Creating a very EASY TO USE installer

[SteveLord]

I recently started working here at Iowa's Board of Medicine as their new IT guy. One of my major responsibilities is prepping DVDs for the board of physicians to use in their meetings when they review cases and licenses. I need to simplify the current process so anyone familiar with such a thing, please help me out if you can.

-Adobe PDFs are used. They are prepared and linked together by other personnel

-They are given to me and I am to burn them onto DVD(s) to be used on a laptop projector.

-They have to be encrypted/secured. Right now, Winzip 10.0 is used for that.

-It has to be able to install and run in a VERY EASY fashion. Doctors are some of the least technical people out there.

-Batch files are what's used right now to create an autorun, install menu and to unzip and extract the files where they need to go + create a shortcut icon on the desktop. This is a VERY long process especially if extra information is submitted to board officials. Could involve extra commands for deleting old stuff and then adding new stuff. Plus remember these are all PDFs that have to link to eachother when they go into their Table of Contents and click other documents from that.

Is there any nifty programs or methods out there that can simplify this dramatically? Remember, since this is confidential info...it has to be secured in a some manner also.

Thanks!

[MikeB12]

just a thought. but why not put the pdf's on the network and use network security to protect them.
then just run them from the network during presentation with a secure user that has rights to the directory needed for the presentation.
Multiple directories and multiple users, and you could create an entire secure file and user directory structure with varying levels of access.


since one group is creating and linking the pdf's and one group is presenting.
and all you're doing is the burning..
if you set this up right, it you could remove most of your workload after it was setup.
the creators put the files in the appropriate directory, then the presenter logs in at presentation time and runs it.
and for the presenter users (non tech oriented Drs), map a network drive in user login so they get drive P or whatever that maps directly to the pdf directory for that conference room. if need be have a directory structure (8am, 9am, 10am, etc...) for each conference room so multiple presentations can be run all day.

the only work you have to do is the creation of the users/rights and file directory structure... and educate them on how it will work. after that it's up to them to use it.

[BenchZowner]

I believe you can do miracles with WinRAR and its SFX ( SelF-eXtracting ) features.
You can prepare a "autorun" HTML page with links to the various documents ( PDFs ) with images and other stuff ( anything goes ), and it's going to be easy to use.
The doctor handling the presentation simply needs to double-click on the self-extracting RAR archive, the archive will be auto-decompressed ( extracted ) to a temporary folder and it will open up the HTML "Index" page with the web browser.
And you can also password protect the archive ( with good encryption ) [ really tough to beat if you use various characters, numbers, symbols, and it's case sensitive ] { a good password may take up to 200+ years on a really fast "password" cracking computers farm }.

Let me know if you need more details, ideas, or help doing it this way.

[SteveLord]

These have to be mailed to board members and investigators prior to meetings and I don't think the conference rooms have ethernet connections so I dont think running it from the server will work. I should have mentioned earlier that all these personnel bring those laptops with the info to the meetings.

I downloaded a popular and recommended program called InnoSetup. Looks like I'll have to educate myself on making scripts for these, but it seems pretty powerful with the right scripts.

[m^2]

Let me suggest using NSIS instead. You can do literally everything with it's scripts, some people even recommend it as a general use programming language. (Even though I'm against such recommendations, they tell something about what does it let you do).