Administrator to install

[Pjotr]

I would like your opinions on the following: :gathering:

From 8.20 (or probably 8.00 which I have not used) admin rights are required to install LabVIEW based executables, the LabVIEW run time engine and e.g. serial support through VISA. In my company end-users do not have these rights, therefore I would be forced to go through our IT departments to get the applications scripted and distributed, a process that takes minimally 2 weeks/iteration, reason to stick to LabVIEW 7.1 for the moment. Since my previous entry on this topic in this forum, NI in the Netherlands have now contacted NI-hq and without further explanation have mailed back to me that there is nothing they can do for me.

I feel that one of LabVIEW's strengths has always been that professional end-user applications can be delivered by laboratory-automation-experts (as contrary to IT experts) in an efficient, powerful and flexible way. The admin privilige that has now become a requirement certainly impacts on this negatively.

In the meantime I have found out (thanks Ulrich&Arnoud!) that there is a workaround, being a copy of selected runtime files to the executable directory. This is surprising, because it shows that the funcamental mechanism for application distribution, LV's runtime library approach, is not necessary in the first place and I feel that NI should have supported this option in the application builder (one big executable) or make it more explicit in their documentation. Clarification from NI on this would be much appreciated.

Vista will add more complexity to this. I am not sure at the moment if this will worsen or better the situation, but am afraid that it will be the first.

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

I feel that one of LabVIEW's strengths has always been that professional end-user applications can be delivered by laboratory-automation-experts (as contrary to IT experts) in an efficient, powerful and flexible way. The admin privilige that has now become a requirement certainly impacts on this negatively.

There are two major reasons why companies prohibit users installing software on their own. First information security. Second users tend to get their workstations easily meshed up which means increases support cost. So from the company IT department point of view, it's a good thing that users cannot pass the protocol by using LabVIEW applications instead of applications written in other languages. If you go on and tell you IT security people that we use LabVIEW 7.1.1 because it can by-pass the security restrictions you have enforced, what do you think they will do?

So I don't think that company security policies can and should be by-passed by modifiying LabVIEW installers so that they will install on security restricted workstations where normal applications won't install. If the policy is a problem and causes too much troubles to your work, it's the policy that should be modified, not LabVIEW. If LabVIEW applications could easily by-pass all security policies, it could force companies to restrict usage of LabVIEW applications alltogether. Of course this would be an ultimate solution, but companies have their security policy there for some reason and if the security policy causes troubles, discuss the IT-department about this policy.