Customers owning a site licence or multi-user licence version of a Claro product are able to distribute that product over multiple computers. This could be done by visiting each computer with the installers on a USB pen drive, and manually installing the product, but this would be very time-consuming. If the computers are connected on a network however it is possible to use Microsoft networking tools to distribute the software from a central location.
All Claro products use Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) files for installation. This means that standard Microsoft installation techniques can be used. For more information on the techniques please consult the following sections.
Claro products often come with high-quality synthesized speech voices: these sound great, but can eat up more disk space than you want. See the Voices section below.
Converting an MSI-plus-CAB into a single MSI file
Claro product installers are supplied as MSIs (installers) plus CAB (data) files. If required, you can convert these files to a single MSI installer file, please see Converting an MSI-plus-CAB into a single MSI file.
Installing using Active Directory Group Policy
Group Policy is a feature of Windows Server which allows the definition of rules that are applied to individual users or groups of users. These rules allow for the installation of software when the user logs into any machine. The following two guides show how to distribute ClaroRead using Group Policies on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Although these guides are aimed at ClaroRead they can be used for any of our products.
Installing for RemoteApp
RemoteApp is a feature in Windows 2008 which allows users to run an application on a remote server but see it as though it were running on their own desktop. Claro products are able to work in this manner however some problems can occur if the software needs to communicate with another piece of software but they aren’t running on the same machine. For instance, if ClaroRead was being run on a server and viewed through RemoteApp but Microsoft Word was running on the client machine then the highlighting and reading features (as well as others) would not be available because ClaroRead would not be able to communicate with Microsoft Word. If both pieces of software were running on the server however then ClaroRead would work normally.
For information on how to install products for use by RemoteApp please see Installing Applications for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and Configuring RemoteApp on Windows Server 2008.
For information on using RemoteApp from Windows XP clients please see Terminal Services RemoteApp (TS RemoteApp).
Prerequisites
Supported Windows version.
Claro products are designed for currently-supported Windows releases. Older versions of Windows will not work properly. You should update to the latest Service Pack for your system. Check the System Requirements listed for your product. ClaroRead System Requirements.
.NET Framework
Some of our products require some version of the .NET Framework. This is noted in the Release Notes for the product here in the Technical Support website.
Some versions of the .NET Framework come in Client and Full versions. For example, there is a .NET 4 Client Profile and a .NET 4 Full Profile. The Full version includes the Client version, so if Client is required than you can install Full and it will work. But you cannot install Client if Full is required: this will not work.
Provide licence key during installation (multi-user key only)
Our licence key (or license key) versions of ClaroRead require a licence key before they will run. This is time-consuming to install by hand across many machines. This is a quicker way to license your software across multiple machines.
Provide the key to the Windows Installer MSI file for ClaroRead as a commandline argument on an elevated command prompt.
Add LICENCEKEY to your MSIEXEC call to install the MSI.
Note that LICENCEKEY is case-sensitive. For example:
msiexec /I Z:\SoftwareDistribution\ClaroRead\ClaroReadPro-engb.msi LICENCEKEY=1234-2342-2123-2312-1232 /passive
This writes the licence key in the ClaroRead.ini file during installation, and when ClaroRead runs it will automatically authenticate online and everything should work – a User can do this, it does not need an administrator.
This is all you have to do for ClaroRead version 6.5.5 or later. If you have an earlier version of ClaroRead you should upgrade now.
Voices
Many of our products come with synthesized speech voices (e.g. ‘RealSpeak Daniel’ or ‘Vocalizer Daniel’). These are usually SAPI5 voices, installed by separate MSI windows installer files. Some voices (Vocalizer, and ScanSoft/RealSpeak) are also available to other applications on the system, but some (Acapela) are not.
Generally, larger voices are better, but because of their high quality some voices can be hundreds of MB in size, so you may or may not want to install them all.
You will find the voices as separate zip or exe files from the download source you have been given for your software.