Since the first day I started developing E4SE (Epicor for Service Enterprises by Epicor) with ICE 1.x, I always wondered why we would be expected to rebuild a site(s) to install customizations. Particularly when you had many sites and when you might only have a few files to update.

At the time, I was working on a project where the customer had 10+ E4SE sites.  Each time they rebuilt the sites it would take 15-20 minutes each (this is using hardware of 5 years ago).  At that rate, it was taking several hours.

This is when I decided to spend a few hours of my own to build the E4SE Customization Installer.  This has since been redesigned with additional features. Without having to completely rebuild the site(s), installing customizations became easy and super fast.  We are talking about seconds!

Many if not all the customizations I performed, I never insisted the customer use the Site Builder unless there was a specific need. If they wanted to, I would deploy the customization(s) into a CAB file for the site builder.  However, many customers liked the fact that the downtime was limited to a few minutes at most using the custom installer.

The E4SE Customization Installer is a simple interface that performs the minimum tasks of:

• XCOPY custom/new files into selected E4SE site(s)
• Perform IISRESET (optional) to clear all loaded objects in order for the update to take place
• Run GenDescriptors (optional) in order for E4SE to acknowledge new items and allow menu and security assignments.

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