I'm perplexed by the behavior of win32 installs from Intune with regard to dependency programs and would like some clarification. I have a single exe install and used the prep tool to create an intunewin file and upload it to Intune. During a "normal" run of this install, the bootstrapper first runs the installs for various versions of vcredist, ODBC SQL Driver, and OLE DB Driver before then running the main product MSI install. When run on Windows, this works as expected with or without the UI (i.e. silent install with command line arguments).
However, when run through Intune, vcredist shows up on the target desktop, but not ODBC or OLE drivers. The install is seen as "successful" on the desktop and management page, however it can't connect to the database for obvious reasons.
What is particularly noteworthy to me is that in the logs on the desktop there is the following line:
PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding EXE_CMD_LINE property. Its value is '/exelang 1033 /exenoui /exenoupdates /noprereqs /qn APPDIR="C:\Program Files\...
That line continues on with the rest of the command line parameters. However, the "Install command" string in the admin center makes no mention of /exenoupdate nor /noprereqs. They have been inserted in between /exenoui and /qn. Why? And is there a way to override this? It appears that this is the reason the included prereqs are not being installed.
What adds to my confusion is that the vcredist files ARE installed, but the other two are not. The only difference I can see is that vcredist are also EXE files, while the two DB drivers are MSI installs. Does only one type of install honor the /noprereqs flag? All of these are Microsoft installs downloaded directly from their website. In the main install package, they are all defined in the same way.
So far MS support has indicated that I should be using the "Dependencies" section of the win32 app in Intune admin center. But this requires adding several additional apps to the setup and it doesn't resolve the question in my mind of why the noprereqs flag is being forced in there, and why some prereqs get installed. Running the EXE install on any Windows system includes everything necessary to run, so from a packaging and deployment perspective it's annoying that the same doesn't work here and requires extra steps. My guess is that if I could override the /noprereqs flag, everything would go on in one step and be much easier.
Any help or insight is appreciated, thank you.
Andrew
