How do I customize my WinZip MSI?

Customizing the WinZip MSI file

Open the WinZip^® MSI file using your MSI editor of choice. Then edit the Property table.

There are three custom properties of the WinZip MSI that can be edited, they are:

• ADDDESKTOPICON - Add the WinZip Desktop icon to the user's desktop
• ADDMENUGROUP - Add a WinZip Menu Group item to Start -> All Programs for each user
• ADDSTARTMENU - Add WinZip to the top of each user's Start Menu

The MSI, as shipped, sets each of the above properties to a value of "1" (enable). Each property can be set to "0" (disable) to prevent the addition of certain functions. To set the value for a particular property to "0", click the value for the property you wish to change, delete the "1" and enter a "0".

There are also two other properties that you can modify to customize your installation:

1. INSTALLCMD - allows or suppresses certain WinZip functionality
2. INSTALLDIR - allows you to set the installation folder for WinZip

The INSTALLCMD property can have switches added to it. These switches must be added before the "/autoinstall" switch and should be in the order of this listing when more than one is added. Each switch should be preceded by the forward slash (/) and should have a space after it. The switches are:

• noqp - prevent WinZip from including the WinZip Quick Pick icon in the taskbar tray
• noc4u - prevent the "Check for Update" function from running
• notip - prevent the "Tip of the Day" from displaying
• nopredefinedjobs - prevent the pre-configured WinZip jobs from being installed
• nojobrunprompt - prevent the prompt dialog from appearing when running WinZip jobs (be sure to consider the security implications of allowing your users to automatically run WinZip Job files before installing with this parameter)
• Additional switch for WinZip 11.0 and later only: altext "XXX" - this will associate the file extension you specified with WinZip. Therefore, double clicking a file with that extension will open the file in WinZip

For example, if you want to customize your installation to have no WinZip Quick Pick icon and no pre-configured WinZip Job files installed, the INSTALLCMD property must read:

/noqp /nopredefinedjobs /autoinstall

The INSTALLDIR property can be added to the list of properties in the table. Adding this property allows you to customize the folder to which WinZip is installed. Insert the INSTALLDIR property and then enter the destination path.

Additional Considerations

Installing WinZip by the usual EXE file, sets up WinZip as a machine level application rather than a user level application. As a result, once WinZip is installed and registered for one user of a computer, WinZip is available and registered to all users of that computer (please keep this in mind when purchasing licenses).

The MSI installation of WinZip also functions as a machine level installation. Consequently, performing a "user configuration" installation by Group Policy (GPO) is not supported.

Therefore, if you will be installing by Group Policy:

• you should NOT use a "User Configuration" group policy
• you SHOULD use a "Computer Configuration" group policy

You may also want to avoid using the administrative install option (MSIEXEC /a) with this MSI file. Although WinZip will install from the resulting program files and MSI file generated from an administrative install, the path to WinZip will be determined by the target folder specified at the time of the administrative install. In other words, if you specify that this administrative install should place the WinZip files in a shared network folder named "Software", the resulting group policy installation of WinZip will be placed on the users' computers with a path of "C:\Software\Program Files\WinZip".