>I guess your experience is more relevant to Kevin's situation - on-site, hands-on installation. My thinking was coloured by a situation we will be facing when the application I'm currently working on is rolled out. Based on the current customer profile there will be :
>A few large users who will want to use existing instances of SQL2000/2005/2008 to be used as the data store
>A few more large users who will not have existing SQL servers but will require SQL2008 for 50+ users,
>A much larger number of users (~2000) whose requirement is for a simple single computer, single user installation.
>
>The first two groups are obviously large enough to warrant having someone take the time to travel to the site and make a custom installation - we wouldn't even try to build an automated installation process.
>
>But that's not the case with the last group - the software revenue would not justify even spending an hour on the installation. So the jury is still out on whether to use SQL-CE or SQL2008 Express for these (database size will not be a factor - even the large users only use comparatively puny tables). My gut feeling is that if I hired someone to create the installer for this using SQL2008 and agreed to pay them $10 for every successful installation on condition that they paid me $50 for every fail then I would be making a substantial profit (but taking a lot of grief from the customers)
>
>I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has successfully created a fully-automated install package for an application using SQL2008 Express that installed successfully on, say, 95% of sites.......
>Best,
>Viv


Will the last group be connected to the internet ? And if so, any means of hosting a large database for them ?