Saturday, November 14, 2009

No Wonder the Excel Add-in Installer Is So Large

Our Dodeca architect, Amy, was having problems with the classic Excel add-in (v11.1.1.3) on her laptop and so I took a look. I decided to look to see if the problem as a rogue copy of the xll file on here systems so I did a search for all of the xll's on her system. Here is what I found:


There are 28 localized versions installed by default. No wonder people are complaining about the size of the download. I didn't check to see but I would guess each of these directories contains a full client (localized) API which would be huge.

I hear they are planning improvements for 11.1.2. For the sake of those still on the classic add-in, I hope so.

4 comments:

Pranava Sistla said...

Could this be the evil genius master plan by Oracle to move the nerds to SmartView?:)

PS. I heard you might be coming up here to Twin Cities in Feb, look forward to it...

-Pranava

http://hyperion-talk-n-menu.blogspot.com

Tim Tow said...

Personally, it seems like a favor by Oracle to move all Essbase users to Dodeca.. BigGrin

Note: Even if the install was smaller, it still requires admin privileges to install it as it requires changes to the path and the environment variables and there is *nothing* that Oracle could do to fix that at this point. Similarly, Smart View also requires admin privileges to install. Dodeca, on the other hand, does not require admin privileges to install plus it is much easier to use than either Excel add-in.

Tim

Pranava Sistla said...

I definitely see the advantages with not requiring admin rights to install, its a big bonus during install/upgrade wrt batch drops of the add-in.

Was wondering because it is installed without admin rights, does the local machine's security or routine clean-up process recognize it as a trusted program? Just curious...

-Pranava
http://hyperion-talk-n-menu.blogspot.com

Tim Tow said...

Dodeca uses Microsoft ClickOnce deployment technology which installs without the need for admin rights. It can install without admin privileges because it writes into a specific directory structure under the users home directory where the user *always* has write privileges. Further, it requires pure .NET managed code and thus runs in a sandbox environment.

We have had great success with this technology including one rollout at one of our banking customers. This customer is using Dodeca at the bank branch level, up through the CFO, and has deployed to 7,000 users across the world.

Tim