Request: Separate Install and Configuration

Having just gone through a 10.1C install, I am reminded once again that as there get to be more and more components in the OpenEdge product line, the installation process can have a huge number of dependencies. Over and over again during these installs I have found myself thinking, "Oh, I'm probably going to want that component sometime soon, but I haven't learned about it yet or set up the other parts yet or whatever". So, having discovered that the install process will ask me for the answers to a bunch of things I don't know, if I do select these components, I now select only the minimum that I am immediately sure of. This, of course, means that when I do get around to wanting to explore these other components that I have to do more installing.

How about separating the install and configuration and providing a configuration tool that can be used as needed to set up the various products? Then, one could even do a complete install, as I do with many other products, just to make sure everything was there. It would be easy to set this up so that a base configuration came up with a message indicating the product was not yet configured should one try to use it without configuration.

Plus, this would lend itself naturally to a nice series of whitepapers on "How to configure X", which could deal both with the choices one needed to make and any dependencies outside the OpenEdge product line, e.g., indicating what needed to be set up for web-related products or pointing to Sonic configuration documents for Sonic related pieces.