Installation Options for Site Administrators

NOTE: This technical note has been updated to reflect HyperRESEARCH version 4.5.0 Installers

 

The following will serve as a guide for site administrators who need to install and manage HyperRESEARCH and/or HyperTRANSCRIBE across large numbers of desktop systems or on centralized applications servers.

 

Disk Images or Desktop Builds

Terminal or Application Servers

Desktop Management Systems

License Management Systems

Command Line Installations

 

If the install consists of more than simply manually installing a software package on someone's individual computer, this information may be of help to you. The wide variety of ways in which organization may choose to manage their desktop software is highly variable, and we have addressed concerns for a variety of these mechanisms.

 

Disk Images or Desktop Builds

Some organizations ensure that any computers (laptops, desktops, etc.) purchased by the organization for individuals at the organization have a standard set of software pre-installed, often referred to as a standard (disk) image or standard build. Organizations may have a number of different "standard" builds for different groups within their organization. These images can be assembled and replicated on to a new computer through a variety of mechanisms, but often software tools are used that help create, manage, and copy these builds on to new (or old) computers. Ghost (now Norton Ghost) has long been a popular tool for imaging individual computers (see http://www.symantec.com/themes/theme.jsp?themeid=ghost). There are many other such tools.

 

Both HyperRESEARCH and HyperTRANSCRIBE are standard desktop applications.

 

  • To incorporate these into an image, they need to be installed, via their installers on the computer from which a master image will be taken.
  • After installation, they need to be licensed.
  • Launch HyperRESEARCH and HyperTRANSCRIBE (as applicable) and enter a "name" (any thing you like) and optional "organization" into the registration box.
  • Then enter a valid license key.

 

Note: Depending upon how you have licensed HyperRESEARCH, your organization may have been provided an individual license key for each license you purchased or a single key for your site. Our application technically just needs a valid key, so if you have multiple license keys, pick one and use it as the key to activate the applicable software (HyperRESEARCH or HyperTRANSCRIBE as they use different keys). Your organization is legally obligated to ensure you have purchase enough individual licenses for your users, but our software doesn't police that. We believe most people are ethical and will honor the terms of the license without the unneccessary overhead of license enforcement code in our applications.

 

Terminal or Application Servers
Terminal or Application servers enable an organization or install a desktop software package on a central server and enable one or more users to connect to that server and run the software off from the server. Such software can either provide a remote connection to a full desktop and all applications installed for that user or can present a single application as if it was running on the users own computer. Such software may also provide license management, allowing an administrator to set how many instances of a specific software application can be open concurrently. Examples of such Application Server software includes Microsoft Terminal Server (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/virtual-desktop-infrastructure/default.aspx) and Citrix (http://www.citrix.com/).

 

For tools like these, install HyperRESEARCH and/or HyperTRANSCRIBE as you would any other desktop application under these Application Servers. Be sure to initially license our applications by opening them and entering a registration name (any name), organization, and valid license key. If you prefer to install and license the software at the same time and are comfortable with command line interfaces, see details on our command line installer options below. Remember that as with Disk Images above, you can use a single license key to register our software and then use, if available, the mechanism such tools have to limit use to your number of licenses. Such application server tools will generally have a property that can be set for each application that is the maximum concurrent users. This should be set to no more than the number of licenses your organization has purchased.

 

Desktop Management Systems
Examples of Desktop Management Systems include LANDesk (http://www.landesk.com/) or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/system-center-2012-r2-configuration-manager/default.aspx). Such systems allow an administrator to remotely deploy software to multiple individual computers and to remotely manage and/or control those individual computers. In these systems, you are deploying software to multiple computers rather than installing on a central application server (above). In general an administrator packages up the installer with some related information or commands and selects a set of computers to deploy the package to.

 

For these systems, administrators often use a command line installation process. See the details on our command line installer options for HyperRESEARCH and HyperTRANSCRIBE. Remember that as with Disk Images above, you can use a single license key to register our software and then use, if available, the mechanism such tools have to limit use to your number of licenses.


License Management Systems
License management systems focus on managing concurrent uses of an application regardless of where it is located or how it was deployed. Many of the software systems mentioned above (Citrix, LANDesk, Ghost Solutions Suite, etc.) include or have optional license management. An additional example of a popular license management system is KeyServer (http://www.sassafras.com/). For license management systems like KeyServer, after you have deployed a licensed version of our software (as part of standard build for example), you can identify our applications to KeyServer and indicate how many concurrent uses to allow.

 

Some license management systems require that the software to be controlled be modified to incorporate their specific management interface, for example, FlexNet/flexlm (http://www.flexerasoftware.com). We do not support such license management systems.

 

Every organization has different approaches and uses different tools in different ways to manage their computers and software. We cannot possibly cover all the wide range of software management tools or the specifics of how to use them. If your site is running any of these tools, then, hopefully, someone there has been trained in their use and/or has access to the vendor's support for such a system. Likewise, we cannot possible test our software on and under every possible management tool. To the best of our testing, our software will work under most major software management tools.

 

Command Line Installations

HyperRESEARCH and HyperTRANSCRIBE support a command-line installation specifically to support the needs of large site customers.

 

You can use Command Prompt on Windows or Terminal on OS X to install. The Installer currently supports these options:

-u or -ui (REQUIRED): tells the Installer not to load its graphic user interface
-D (REQUIRED): full destination path (e.g. "C:\Program Files" or C:\Program Files (x86)" on 64-bit systems)
-l (optional): full path to a file to log output
-k (optional): valid registration key
-o (optional): organization name for registration
-a (optional): flag for creating desktop alias/shortcut

-r (optional; WINDOWS ONLY): flag for updating file associations in the Windows Registry

Please note that options flags are case-sensitive. The -a and -r flags are Booleans; they require no argument following the flag, as the others do. The options can be used in any order, but of course the data for a given option must follow that option.

 

As with any shell commands, arguments passed to the Installer which have spaces in them must be enclosed in quotes.

In this installer version, only hard disk installs are supported, not dual-platform USB installs. For dual-platform USB installs, you must run the installer with the graphic user interface.

 

Option Details:

-u[i] is required; without it the Installer will launch as a graphical user interface (GUI) application and no further processing of command-line options will happen.

-D is required, and must be a full path to the destination folder. The Installer will append that path with the name and version of the application, so, for example, if you pass "C:\Program Files" the app will be installed in "C:\Program Files\HyperRESEARCH 3.0" when installing HyperRESEARCH 3.0. On Windows 64 bit systems, remeber to install to "C:\Program Files (x86)".

-l is for logging. You must specify a path and log file name. This must be a full path; partial paths may cause the file to be created in unexpected locations, as the default directory changes many times during installation.

-k is for a valid HyperRESEARCH v3.x registration key or valid HyperTRANSCRIBE 1.x registration key (as applicable). Using this option will cause the Installer to create a registration file in the application's Components folder, so it can be used by all users on that computer. The key is checked for validity before installation begins, and will write a warning to the log file if the key is invalid. If this option is not used, the installer installs HyperRESEARCH or HyperTRANSCRIBE in it's free trial mode.

-o is the name of the organization, used where both the user name and organization are placed in the reg file when installing manually. This option is only useful when -k is used; if not creating a registration file this option is ignored. The option's parameter is used as both the Name and Organization in the registration information.

-a causes the installer to create an alias (Mac) or shortcut (Windows) on the user's desktop to the application that's been installed. This option has no data; simply include it if you want an alias/shortcut created, or leave it out if not.

-r (WINDOWS ONLY) adds the applicable file associations for HyperRESEARCH (.hs2, .hs4, .rwtl, .hsz, and .hs4z) or HyperTRANSCRIBE (.htd and .ht2), which ever is being installed, to the Windows Registry. If the user does not have administrative access to their own computer, this options should be included. Otherwise the user will be prompted upon launch of the application if they want the indicated file extensions associated with that application.

 

The installer options syntax is the same on both platforms, using the file path delimiters specific to each platform:

 

macOS Example:
NOTE: On OSX, you launch applications in Terminal with the 'Open' command and pass arguments with the '--args' switch.

open "/Users/[user]/Desktop/HyperRESEARCH 4.5.6 Installer.app" --args -ui -l "/Users/[user]/Desktop/installerlog.txt" -D "/Applications" -a

OR

open "/Users/[user]/Desktop/HyperRESEARCH 4.5.6 Installer.app" --args -ui -D "/Applications" -k XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX -o "Acme University" -a

OR

open "/Users/[user]/Desktop/HyperTRANSCRIBE 2.0.1 Installer.app" --args -ui -D "/Applications" -a

 

Windows Example:

"C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\HyperRESEARCH456_Installer.exe" -u -l "C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\installerlog.txt" -D "C:\Program Files (x86)" -a

OR

"C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\HyperRESEARCH456_Installer.exe" -u -l "C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\installerlog.txt" -D "C:\Program Files (x86)" -k XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX -o "Acme University" -a

OR

"C:\Users\[user]\Desktop\HyperTRANSCRIBE201_Installer.exe" -u -D "C:\Program Files (x86)" -a