Better beacon installs/upgrades

IT Asset Management version 2020 R2.1

Improvements have been made to the installation and upgrade of inventory beacons to better support custom installation paths:

A new registry location [Registry]\Beacon\CurrentVersion\DistributionLocation may be populated with the customized parent folder for inventory beacon logs and configuration files. This may be specified, for example, as Distribution Folder through the inventory beacon installer. If this setting is not already present, nor specified for this installation/upgrade, the default location is %CommonAppData%\Flexera Software. Once the setting is available in the registry (set either through installation or through an upgrade), it is honored through future upgrades, whether those are through self-updates, or through third-party tools using an answer file. This means that the custom path can be "set and forget" for each inventory beacon, depending on your method of handling updates.
Note: If you use the inventory beacon installer UI to drive the installation/update manually, the Change Distribution Folder page requires an input value, and any input here updates the setting for the DistributionLocation.
There is a new variable called DATADIR that can specify the custom path to write into the DistributionLocation registry value. This variable is available either:
- For those using answer files to manage installation/upgrade with third-party tools, in the answer file:
```
[Folders]
DATADIR=D:\NewFolder
```
- For those running the inventory beacon installer from the command line, as a command-line parameter – for example, for an update:
```
BeaconInstaller.exe /s /v"/l*v C:\temp\Upgrade.log REINSTALLMODE=amus 
    ALLUSERS=1 REBOOT=ReallySuppress DATADIR=D:\NewFolder /qn"
```

Remember: If you use the upgrade process to specify a new location for the distribution folder on an inventory beacon, you most likely need to manually move all existing files from the old default location to your new custom locations. Setting the location does only that – specifies the folder for future activities. It does not automate any data maintenance.

In the March (2020 R2.2) update, the online help will be updated for Inventory Beacons > Inventory Beacon Reference > File Paths for Inventory Beacon, and also Registry Keys for Inventory Beacon.

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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