Talking About InstallShield
It's often interesting to find out how a company sees itself. I recently asked Blair Symes, marketing manager for Flexera Software, how the company views its product and customers. We
reviewed Flexera's InstallShield in the November issue of Visual Studio Magazine.
Peter Vogel: From your point of view, what is InstallShield?
Blair Symes: InstallShield is the gold standard for building Windows software installations (and has been for over 20 years). InstallShield gives developers a flawless localized installation experience for their software, keeping their end users happy and support costs down.
P: Who are your target customers?
B: The target audience for InstallShield is software developers working for software vendors that sell applications commercially and developers working for enterprises (in any industry) or government agencies that develop custom applications for their organizations.
P: Those are big categories.
B: We break them down into two different roles. We distinguish between "Setup authors" (also known as "release engineers," "build engineers," or "software developers") and "Development/Configuration managers." Both groups are risk averse: They want a reliable process that guarantees a successful installation. The first group -- the setup authors -- also want the software installation creation process to take as little time as possible (and require as little effort as possible). They're working on tight schedules and budgets and don't want to have to learn a new tool on each development cycle.
The second group -- development/configuration managers -- are typically managing multiple projects with no time for mistakes and release dates that must be kept. So they're interested in managing their resources efficiently and ensuring collaboration. Reliability and predictability within a project schedule matters to them.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 11/29/2010