Introduction

Spindle Document Distribution is typically installed by running the installer executable manually. However, this may be impractical for some larger sites if the number of installs is significant. In these cases, Spindle Document Distribution can be deployed using software such as Marimba by BMC or SCCM from Microsoft.

NOTE: If you need to deploy Spindle Document Management Client in this manner, please see  KBA-05-01-015 - Spindle Document Management Client silent/command line installation

Method

Deployment systems typically require a single command to be run on the destination PC. As supplied, the exe files available in the Partner Portal will not install if run without modification. Instead we need to extract the MS Installer file (.msi) and call this file from the command msiexec.

Extracting the MSI file

• Open a command prompt as Administrator
• Navigate to the folder containing the installer executable
• Run the following command: SpindleDocumentDistribution.exe/s /x /b"C:\Log" /v"/qn" (pay particular attention to the double quotes)

This process only needs to be done once to provide us with the MSI file.

Deploying the MSI

The deployment software will typically require a command line to run, and the MSI to use. It will copy the MSI to the user's PC and then run the command on it.

The command we need is the following:

msiexec /i SpindleDocumentDistribution.msi /l*v log\test.log /qn INSTALLDIR="C:\Program Files (x86)\Draycir\Spindle Document Distribution\" FORMSSHAREDDIR="\\Server\Path\To\Shared\FolderDraycir" 

We need to amend the path under FORMSSHAREDDIR to the correct shared folder location.

Pre-requisites

Although the installer will detect any required additional components (for example, dot net frameworks, Visual C++ Redistributables etc.) and will initiate a download of any missing items, in certain cases the download may fail. At the time of writing (May 2021) there is a known issue with the download URL for Visual C++ 2010 redistributable. See KBA-01-03-034 - Unable to Download Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package for further details.

In these cases it is better to ensure that the dependencies are in place on the target machine before deploying the installer.

Spindle Document Distribution has the following dependencies:

• MS dotnet framework 3.5
• MS dotnet framework v4+
• MS Visual C++ Redistributable 2010 (x86)
• MS Visual C++ Redistributable 2013 (x86)
• MS Visual C++ Redistributable 2015-19 (x86)

additionally, for 64-bit machines:

• MS Visual C++ Redistributable 2013 (x64)

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