SPI Interface

MAY Computer

Introduction

2006-02-01

This document is an introduction to the SPI-Interface, it's purpose and it's history.

  1. What is SPI?
  2. Prerequisites
  3. Why SPI?
  4. How does SPI look like?
  5. History
  6. Further documentation
  7. Contact information

What is SPI?

SPI is the abbreviation for Stupsi Processing Information.

It is actually a simple human readable ASCII file containing processing information for our product Stupsi which is a tool for software update distribution.

Prerequisites

On a machine where you want to process a SPI script files you need a Win2000/XP/2003 OS and Stupsi.

Why SPI?

As long as you have a lot of software installed locally on a workstation and a lot of settings to be made it may also occur that

With an SPI script you can simply do these and other actions. These scripts are automatically executed on the workstations on startup and relogin by the Stupsi application.

So administrators do not need to run to every client to make the same change on each machine.

How does SPI look like?

An SPI file is simply some settings and a list of actions to perform - Here is a sample:

APPLICATION=DoDAI.exe
;Update global DLLs
SRCPREFIX="%SERVERFOLDER%\_src\"
UNREGISTER="%COMMONFILES%\MAYComputer\wmDOCS1.dll"
UNREGISTER="%COMMONFILES%\MAYComputer\wmGlob1.dll"
UPDFILE=wmGlob1.dll "%COMMONFILES%\MAYCOMPUTER"
UPDFILE=wmDOCS1.dll "%COMMONFILES%\MAYCOMPUTER"
REGISTER="%COMMONFILES%\MAYComputer\wmGlob1.dll"
REGISTER="%COMMONFILES%\MAYComputer\wmDOCS1.dll"
;Copy global DAI-Info documentation
CPYFILE=DAI-Info3.pdf "%COMMONFILES%\MAYCOMPUTER"
;Update application files
SRCPREFIX="%SERVERFOLDER%\_src\DoDAI\Update\"
UPDFILE=DoDAI.exe "%APPPATH%"
CPYFILE=DoDAI.ini "%APPPATH%"
CPYFILE=ReadMe.txt "%APPPATH%"
UPDFILE=DoDAIAI.dll "%APPPATH%"
CPYFILE=NewAddIn.cls "%APPPATH%"

History

In our projects we are used to implement further enhancements that help improving the process run or improve the user interface as well as general functionality. Our desire is to make these enhancements (and bugfixes as well) available to the users as fast as possible. After an exe or dll has been compiled and tested the file should go to the destination machine as fast as possible. Building Patch-Packages with tools like SMS-Installer for example slows down this process and/or even needs the distribution of a large package even if only one file has been changed. And besides you need the patch to be executed on every workstation so SMS-Installer etc. is needed on the clients network which a customer may not want to use because of several considerations. So we developed the Stupsi application.

Since we use Stupsi at customers we can answer more quickly on pug reports or enhancement requests. We can send only the patched or enhanced exe or dll and it is put on the server where the software installation files reside. Then the administrator uses the SPI-Admin program and only needs to select an application and click a button to distribute the update for the application. On login of the users the file(s) get(s) updated by the Stupsi client.

Meanwhile our customers use Stupsi not only for updating the MAY Computer applications as it can be used for any other updates also. Each setup that can be run silently can be distributed with Stupsi without the need of any user interaction on the workstations.

Further Documentation

The documentation of the available commands of the SPI interface is availble as PDF file.

Contact Information

Technical support and latest information on our products are available at http://support.may.co.at

E-Mail support: mailto:support@may.co.at

MAY Computer GmbH & Co KG
Microsoft Solution Provider
Galvanigasse 2
A-1210 Vienna / Austria
Tel.: +43/1/278 20 80 Fax: +43/1/278 20 80 /22
http://www.may.co.at