Installing on Windows Vista®
With the release of Windows Vista®, a new feature called User Access Control was introduced. The main goal of User Account Control is to reduce the exposure and attack surface of the operating system by requiring that all users run in standard user mode and software is installed on a per user basis by default. For programs such as SmartDraw, which takes an average of 2 gigabytes of disk space, per user installation by machine is not recommended.
As a defense-in-depth measure, User Account Control also provides additional protection for administrators through its Administrator Approval Mode. With Administrator Approval Mode, Windows Vista® will run most applications with standard user permissions even if the user is an administrator. If a user wishes to run a program that requires administrator permissions, they must give consent through a User Account Control prompt. This helps limit malware's ability to make system-wide changes without the administrator's knowledge. However, Administrator Approval Mode does not provide the same level of security or control as a true standard user account.
The UAC control creates some difficulties when installing SmartDraw, as the Windows Installer 4.0 engine, running in the Local System account on Windows Vista®, has lesser permissions than it had on previous Windows versions and inheritance of permissions does not work properly with MSI installations.
Installing a individual client PC
To work around this, you must install with setup.exe, instead of setup.msi. Windows Vista® will immediately detect that setup.exe is an install program that will require elevated rights and therefore display the UAC prompt in which you can give it permission to continue running. As a result, the entire install executes with elevated privileges. In contrast, when running the setup.msi directly, the UAC prompts occur later and do not elevate rights in the correct sequence of events; as a result, and most installations run with restricted permissions.
Deploying via Group Policy & SMS®
Deploying via Group Policy, SMS® or other deployment systems should largely remain unaffected, as the Systems Administrator should not be affected by UAC when deploying to a Vista® client. Please contact support@smartdraw.com with your network environment details if you encounter problems.
As documentation on how to work with these new restrictions is released, SmartDraw will continue to monitor and improve this aspect of installation.
