Silent ACT! Compass Deployment with SCCM
So the developers at ACT! are the good guys. The .exe installer for Compass testing software can be installed silently, and they even tell you how up front; using file.exe /S /v/qn will silently install the necessary Compass software.
You still have to register MAC addresses, but that's just good security. While you can use this method to install, there is a better option for SCCM deployment.
If you administer or deploy the Compass test, you're probably familiar with the ACT! Compass Admin page located at https://compass.act.org/eCompass/login.do. It seems to require IE, and I just cancel the software installations, Get MAC Address, and hit OK to download the installer to my reference machine's desktop.
Open the installer, and you'll notice this information shooting by really fast.
That's correct, it's decompressing an MSI file. Didn't take me long to find it, either. It's in ~\AppData\Local\Temp\ in a folder representing the registry package name.
I copied the four extracted files to our application server, and created a package using the MSI, and changed as much of the application information (which imports as gibberish), and summarized and finished the package creation.
I immediately went back in to modify the package, fixing all the gibberish. I don't want the installer looking like this.
While modifying the package, change the quiet trigger (/q) to quiet no-UI (/qn), and do the same with the Uninstallation string, which actually works.
Pretty easy, as far as application deployments go. Silent installation, uninstallation, and installer detection, with very little messing around. Very similar to Java, minus post-installation woes.
