This post was originally planned as a concise technical post on machine learning, the Cloud, and various other buzzwords you can imagine, but it ended up being a story about how smart our world has become. To start in the right place, we need to go back in time.

Prehistory

Back when I started MSI packaging, there was not much documentation apart from what you could find on your MSDN CD-ROM, and the associated tools were not very developed.

Some will remember the free copy of WinInstall Light bundled with the Windows 2000 installation CD-ROM and there was always dear old Orca.

The situation was something like this:

You’re on your own

Some will also remember the lack of virtual machines. Instead, we had physical machines stacked to the ceiling that had to be constantly reinstalled in order to develop and test. I have lost count of the hours I’ve spent installing a package, finding an error, reinstalling the computer, changing the package, and starting all over again.

Current era:

Today we have new tools such as: virtual machines, AdminStudio, Wise Package Studio, etc. The internet has provided access to an abundance of documentation from various sources including: AppDeploy, IT-Ninja, and similar forums. While it is true that operating systems and applications have become more complicated, we also have access to many more resources; not least of which is sharing knowledge with other professionals.

The situation today is now something like this:

We help each other

Now the challenges are somewhat different than before, because there’s no shortage of knowledge out there. Instead, the problem we face today is sorting through the information overload to find the right nuggets: how to handle user data in your Feature design, how to handle installations containing drivers, what is DIFxApp, etc. In the end, one often ends up finding the information shared among a select group of people or on websites whose professionalism and quality you trust.

The future

The future is effortlessly sharing your knowledge and automatically receiving professional, high-quality knowledge. This future has just begun, at least in the area of software packaging!

Smart Package Studio has built-in knowledge sharing that requires no effort on your part to share or receive information. In fact, the process is so streamlined that you might not even notice it until you start to wonder why it’s suddenly become much easier to develop MSI packages!

Everyone helps each other with relevant knowledge

When you clean up a Smart Capture project, create a transform file, or edit an MSI package the information is automatically and anonymously sent to Smart Package Studio’s cloud service. The changes are analyzed and when the algorithms have determined that the information is relevant, it’s sent to all installations of Smart Package Studio. This happens automatically every time you open the program, without you having to concern yourself with machine learning, the Cloud, or algorithms. Your thoughts are turned into thoughtfulness to benefit us all.

In future blog posts, I will dive deeper into the core of Smart Package Studio. Look forward to more soon!