What is the purpose of administrative installation initiated using msiexec /a?

Question

Windows Installer technology supports administrative installation. The command line for initiating administrative installation is: \'msiexec /a setup.msi\'.

Answer 1

Say that you need to install product X on some number of machines, and that you will need to apply some patches for X as well. Rather than applying a series of patches on each machine, you can do this:

• Create an administrative image for X
• Apply the patches to the administrative image
• Install X on each machine using the patched image

It can save some time and effort, and you'll know that all your machines are certain to be at the same patch level.