How to silently install specific SAP Business Intelligence Client Tools

Below I describe how one can perform a custom, silent installation. In this example, I’ll only install widgets. This example uses SP6 but should be similar for other versions of the product.

Extract the client media to a directory. Here I’ve chosen C:\BusinessObjectsClient.
Open a command prompt from the start menu (Start | Programs | Accessories |Command Prompt).
Navigate to the directory where you extracted the media.
Run the command setup -w c:\response.ini. You can specify a different path and filename if you like. This command will create a file that tells the installer which items it should install and where.
The installer has launched thanks to the previous command.
Select the components you want to install.
Complete the installation. Note: nothing will get installed, rather a file will be created in the location you specified in step 4.
Notice that the file shows the selections for where the product should be installed, language options and what actually should be installed.
Launch the installation by changing the switch to -r instead of -w which will read the file instead of writing it. In a typical use case you may want to create a .bat file to automatically run the setup command. If you’d like to do this offline, consider using a dvd or perhaps a memory stick.
Widgets have now been successfully installed!