Civil 3D 2015 Deployment Question of the Day: No, You are Not Crazy

It's that time of year where companies are gearing up to deploy their new Autodesk products.  Some people are met with a surprise when they reach the screen where they would normally see the ability to download the most recent service packs.

At this point, normally you would see the ability to download the available service packs and include them in the deployment "on-the-fly". The following screengrab shows what this looks like in Revit 2015.

For Civil 3D 2015 and Map 3D 2015, this option has been omitted from the interface (not 100% sure why). 

You can always extract the MSI from the exe and use the Add... button to browse to the location of the MSI.  This process is cumbersome, in my opinion.

The easiest way to add service packs, subscription add-ons or other tools to your deployment is to use the Include Additional Software section. 

From the Install Additional Software area, you can add any exe or MSI and control the order in which it installs. You'll see a column for Command Line Parameters to the left of the Path.  Command line parameters are install switches you can use to force these additional installs to run silently.  

Command Line Parameters (I'll add more as I find them):

/Q = Quiet (use this if you want the add-ons to install without displaying dialog boxes)

/W = wait until all "child" installs are complete (I recommend adding this to all additional software you install.)

Go forth and install! Before you know it you'll be building your 2016 deployments.