Comic Life 2 Deployment

MSI packaging ain't what it used to be... anyway I will cut to the chase. I was required to deploy Comic Life 2 to the network. I did a few tests, as Plasq (Company that created Comic life) have create an MSI for 'Network' Deployment i thought i would try that. Called on my old friend Orca, and had a look at the MSI. No place for a serial.. After waiting a couple of days for a response from the good people at Plasq they finally came through with the goods, a network installation guide for Comic Life (although it was for the previous version..) My next hurdle was that Comic life couldn’t register behind the proxy. Good thing Plasq offer offline activation. I ended up deploying 2 MSI’s. The one that Plasq created for Comic Life 2, the second for 2 registry keys containing the offline activation code / serial key. There are two different registry keys I included within this MSI, one for Windows XP and one for Windows 7 x64 (These are the two OS’s deployed in this environment, from what I can see win7x86 should be the same as the XP 32bit pathway).

Basically what I did was;

·         Contact Plasq for an offline registration code for Comic Life 2

·         Install Comic life 2 on a clean workstation

·         Add the offline registration details for all users.

·         Test that the offline registration worked by opening Comic Life 2

·         Browse to the registry pathway below depending on your OS

·         Export the Registry Keys from the subfolder of software (for XP 32bit “plasq” for Win7 64bit “Wow6432Node”) to somewhere easy to find

·         Create the path for the other OS if required (Import the exported registry key from the previous step into the pathway listed for the other OS) and export that also, again to somewhere easy to find later.

·         Once exported, delete the keys we have just created. Use your favourite MSI creation tool (EZmsi is great for snapshots) to take a pre snapshot of the system, reimport the registry keys and then take the post snapshot.

You could also deploy the exported registry keys via other means, logon or startup scripts etc. I unfortunately did not have that luxury under the strict SOE.

Below are the pathways for the registry keys:

Windows XP 32bit:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\plasq\Licenses\Comic Life 2]

Windows 7 64bit:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\plasq\Licenses\Comic Life 2]

Otherwise, see the official Comic life network installation guide