If you’ve ever tried to push out a silent QuickBooks installation to a computer, you probably know its not supported by Intuit. Nor can you just extract the MSI and add parameters for licensing and install directory. It’s darn near impossible to do without some sort of automation script such as AutoIT Script. I’ve tried using an MSI editor in the past and didn’t get very far because there were some missing properties.
Today I found a post on a fairly new blog called VirtualAppPack. The article has good step-by-step instructions how to create a transform file and adding the missing licensing properties. The only thing I would add to his post is not to expect an installation to complete if you add the ‘/qb’ parameter to your MSIEXEC command. For some reason or another, it doesn’t do a full install of QuickBooks with that command. But if you use ‘/qn’, it will perform a full install.