Inside the FileMaker Server Install Folder there's a very interesting file named Assisted Install and you can find it here on Windows also inside the Installation Folder. With this file you can minimize the interaction with the installer by presetting your information and choices. Why, you ask? Well, it comes in very handy if you need to install multiple servers and you have a FileMaker Volume License Agreement. FVLA lets you install multiple machines with the same license key. The Assisted Install is also very useful for testing servers where you might install and uninstall software frequently. And in all circumstances it saves you from having to find and type all of that information over and over again, especially that pesky, long, 35-character license key. And you can do the same thing with FileMaker Pro by the way. The Assisted Install has limited value if you have only one FileMaker Server to install and here's how it works. Well, first of all it doesn't work if you're installing from a CD because you need to make changes to this file and save it. So you need to copy the installer files to the server hard disk or to a network share. When you have the files in the right location, you can just go ahead and open this file and enter your information. The first piece of information is a user name. You can leave this blank if you want and if you do leave it blank, the currently logged in user's name will be used in OS X and the name used to register Windows will be used on Windows. The second piece of information is your organization name. Now, this has to match what's on your license that you've obtained from FileMaker. Then comes your license key and then we have to specify some choices very specific to the installation. We want to be doing a one-machine deployment so we'll leave this as they were, meaning that it will be type zero. That's a one-machine deployment and the machine role of the machine that we're currently installing on will be the master machine. And we do choose to show the deployment wizard when the installation is done. Remember from the installation process that the deployment wizard is where set and enable ODBC, where you hook up to your web server and where you enable web publishing if you want that. Skip dialog; if the setting is set to zero, it will skip dialog when the installer runs. That's the installer where you can type in a user name, organization and the license key. Note that for those of you who are used to the old version of the Assisted Install that there's no more language preference. It will use whatever the language of the operating system is. Also gone from this file is the startup option. The startup behavior of FileMaker Server has changed quite a bit over the years. The fact that the main FileMaker Service or daemon now automatically starts when the machine boots does not mean that it also opens the files when it does. Opening the files is now a separate preference that you can set in the Admin Console. Additionally, but only on Windows you can also make the install process a truly silent install, meaning that there will be no interaction at all and to make this happen, you need to make a change to this file, the Setup.ini file. And right here where it says Command Line, you change this switch from L to Q. Now, save out this file and when you run the Setup.exe, there will be no interaction at all. This option is not available under Mac.