For users within an enterprise environment, like a university technical services department, where one’s machines are managed by a central IT, the MarcEdit installer/application does support push installation.  What’s more, the program includes the capability to provide automated software updates utilizing system group policies.  More information will be provided about this process in Chapter 3: Understanding the MarcEdit Preferences.

MarcEdit is written in C# and designed to run on any system with a flavor of the .NET Framework installed. For Windows users, the .NET framework is considered a part of the current generation operating system, though you may need to update to a current version of the framework if out of date. If you are running a Linux System, you will want to go to http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page to download the Mono Framework, and open source alternative to Microsoft’s .NET framework, for your particular operating system.  Mac users will find their own download, which requires no additional downloads (save for Z39.50 components)

Because of the ubiquity of the .NET and Mono frameworks, most current generation Windows and Linux systems will likely have some variation available for use.  for most users, you will just need to determine if your version of the framework will support MarcEdit.  If you are unsure what version of the framework you may have installed, or are unsure if you have a version of the framework installed, MarcEdit’s installer does evaluate your operating system and will warn you if specific dependencies are not available or are out of date.

System Requirements

Prior to MarcEdit 5+, users had to know a great deal about their systems prior to installing MarcEdit.  In previous versions, MarcEdit made use of a variety of operating system components that may or may not be installed as part of the system.  For example, MarcEdit 3 and 4, required users to ensure that they had installed the msxml libraries, MDAC, and the Excel OBDC redistributable.  Their were other optional components that previous versions of MarcEdit may also use, but the program could function if they were missing.  Unfortunately, the wide range of system requirements sometimes made adoption of the application difficult.

For MarcEdit 5 and 6, the only system requirement is the presence of the .NET Framework, specifically, the 4.0 Client Profile or later. For MarcEdit 7, the requirements have changed, as the program takes advantage of a number of new .NET language elements, so users must have version 4.6.1+ of the .NET Framework installed. Much like an application developed in Java, the .NET framework includes all the necessary requirements for MarcEdit to function.  This alleviates the user from having to install multiple pre-requisites and hopefully simplifies the installation processes.  The downside to using a framework like the .NET framework is that MarcEdit can only run on systems that are supported by the framework itself.  This means that very old versions of Windows (XP SP 2 and lower) will be unable to run MarcEdit because they are no longer supported by a compatible version of the framework.  As of this writing, the following Windows-based systems are supported: