BoardSurfers: Installation Know-How: Installing Cadence OrCAD and Allegro Products Without Administrative Rights

Often organizations do not grant administrative privileges to users on their systems. Performing administrative tasks by standard users can be of greater risk than benefit as this could lead to serious virus and malware infections and catastrophic data loss. So, in most organizations IT policy always reserve the administrative rights to the Service Desk to ensure that standard users who do not have administrative rights can effectively execute their routine work without any threat of external interventions.

If you try installing Cadence OrCAD® and Allegro® products with limited user permissions, then the software may not be properly configured on your system. This is because the installation process does critical operations like writing into the Windows registry or system folders, setup services, and much more. Does that mean users who do not have administrative rights cannot install and use OrCAD and Allegro products on Windows at all? The answer is NO, they can with minimal support from the administrator. In this post, I will share the process to install Cadence products on Windows for standard users and what they need to do to update the installation to its latest version.

Installing Products for Standard Users

You must know that if you are a standard user you can download software and updates, but without administrative rights, you can install and update the software too. However, you may need a one-time special configuration to be done by your system administrator. The process to install products remains the same as I had explained in my previous blog for standard users, except the following two settings will not be available:

• The installation setting All Users is disabled.

• The input license details do not provide the Install License Server option and are grayed out.

In the Setup Complete dialog, the standard user will be required to run the Configure Install Utility by the system administrator.

Running Configure Install Utility

The last step in the Setup Complete dialog is to run Configure Install Utility. This utility can only be run by a system administrator and a one-time process. It is the only step where standard users need external support to configure and complete the installation.

There are two ways to run this utility to complete the installation and configure the system to be able to access products installed without administrative rights:

1. Enter the following command at the command prompt to run the batch file with default values:<install_directory>\tools\InstallUtils\AdminActions.bat
2. To run the utility in the GUI mode, perform the following steps:

a. Double-click <install_directory>\tools\Installutils\InstallConfig.exe.

b. Click Next in the Installation Configuration Utility dialog.

c. Choose the first option Perform one time system level configuration and click Next.

d. Ensure the installation location is correct. By default, it is prepopulated with the installation directory path. Click Configure.

The configuring process will start, and you will see a progress meter.

e. Once completed, verify the summary, and click Finish.

The standard user is now all set and can access product installation.

Updating Installation for Standard Users

After reading this, the next question that would immediately come to your mind will be about installing software updates? Will I need administrative support to repeat the same process every time a hotfix is available? No, this is a one-time task. Once the configure utility is installed on your system it is available forever. Standard users can now download and install the software updates on their own at any time and use Cadence OrCAD and Allegro products.

Conclusion

To sum up, users with nonadministrative rights can also install and use Cadence OrCAD and Allegro products. An additional one-time step is required to complete the installation and configuration which requires system administrator support.

Keep reading for more information on Installing Cadence OrCAD and Allegro products on Windows.