Purpose of Admin Install

[Kristan]

I am doing some reading and research and came across the different install parameters for msiexec.

Can anyone explain the purpose of doing and Administration (/a) install?

Thanks,
Kristan

[Christopher Painter]

Administrative installs are used by SysAdmins to customize an installation and slip-stream it with various patches. All of this gets written to a network share that becomes a setup to be used to deploy to all the various clients.

Frankly I don't see that value in the model and I don't reccomend it. Customization can be achieved by using transforms and patches can be managed with a tool like SMS 2003 which can handle MSI sourcelist management, patch detection and execution.

[Kristan]

Chris, thanks. That's sort of what i was thinking. I didn't see the value of the admin install especially when transforms seem like they would be much more powerful.