[MS Office - 2007] Office 2007 deployment - join the crusade

[srochford]

Originally Posted by contink

I'd say your cynicism was bang on there.. It's going to backfire though when all the techs find themselves looking harder at Openoffice or just stay back with 2003.

The trouble is that people like us buy MS software on the Campus license so we've paid for Office 2007 whether we use it or not (same goes for Vista!)

This means that Microsoft get our money and don't really care if we don't like the software - we have to keep paying them even if we want to stay with Office 2003/Windows XP. There is a buyout option but it's not cheap and it's not easy (the beauty of the "rental" system is that you're licensed for every machine for all the software you add to the agreement - this makes it easy to make sure you have enough licenses but it also could be expensive!)

[gshaw]

Did anyone see the article in Computing magazine that if Microsoft don't resolve their differences with Becta schools will be going Open Source by 2012

[contink]

Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere but when it comes to sorting out the actual deployment of Office 2007 this little document is proving quite useful for many of the config.xml flags...

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=94264 ... pages 53 - 60

There's a few example config.xml files around as well but the one I was looking at has gone walkabout.. so I can't post a link...

Not looking forward to this though.. because staff here have had 2k7 on their laptops the pressure's there for it to be deployed for all..

[contink]

This is seriously starting to p*ss me off...

MS have so much conflicting ruddy information out there about this POS package that it makes no sense when you are actually "well informed".

I've been trying to get the SP1 to deploy with fresh Office 2007 installs and keep hitting problems. I suspect because I have a custom config.xml file which doubtless stops certain things working in the patching process and thus borks everything.. Wonderful!

Any intel on this though would be appreciated... I really don't want to put ALL of the cr*p on each machine when it's not used.


This proves particularly unhelpful when compared to the "accepted known approach" to deploying SP1

Use Group Policy Software Installation to deploy the 2007 Office system

Challenging to maintain, because updates must be applied to all client computers. This can be done by using a logon script or other delivery method. It is not possible to use the Updates folder to apply security updates or service packs for initial deployment of the Group Policy object (GPO).

This goes against EVERYTHING I've read elsewhere about slipstreaming for office 2007
Logistix IT Consultancy and Support Services



I'd love to say that WSUS would be the solution but when you consider that I have a wireless system here and limited capacity in terms of power sockets and physical space it's really something I'd prefer got rolled out immediately and not in 15 weeks time in the middle of a lesson.

[srochford]

One thing you could do is set the config.xml to do a cache of the local installation source but not install (<LIS CACHEACTION="CacheOnly" />). That will give you a whole set of files under c:\msocache\all users - you can then copy this whole folder tree to each machine. Once it's completely copied then you can run setup from there - this is basically what things like SMS do; I think they use BITS to "trickle" the files in so that you don't trash your network bandwidth but you do get it all cached eventually.

Once you start running setup, it's running from the c: drive and should run reasonably quickly. I've done basically this and it does use the MSP files in the updates folder.

[contink]

Thanks Steve, appreciate the suggestion... I think there's something else going on here though that's going to cause problems with the whole setup regardless.

[Psymon]

Think we might have cracked it partly.

Configure Config.xml to contain Product key, user, company etc...
Deploy complete suite via GPSI
use MSIEXEC.exe to install an MSP - AppDeploy > FAQs > How Do I Deploy A MSI Patch (MSP)?
Can use 2 instances one for 07 SP1, the other to install the MSP Customisation file

Anyone tried this? Were about to give it a go in the next week on a test network.

[Michael]

This goes against EVERYTHING I've read elsewhere about slipstreaming for office 2007

By the looks of things, deploying Office 2007 using GPOs won't pick up hotfixes or service packs within the \Updates folder, however if you run Setup.exe using a script then it should. Extracting MSP files into the \Updates folder is the only method. You cannot actually integrate updates as you could with Office 2003.

[srochford]

there are good and bad things about the new method.

With the office 2003 (and earlier) MSIs you did an admin install to the server, deployed to clients and all is well. A user then wants (say) equation editor and the workstation connects back to the server, picks up the new item and installs it - all is good :-)

You then download the service pack and update the admin install. You start installing new machines from this location - no problems.

Another user with machines from the first batch wants a new component. The MSI recognises it needs to go back to the server share but now it falls over - it doesn't recognise the files on the server because they are effectively a different install.

The only way round this is to force a redeploy from the original folder -that way all your machines get updated (real pain because it's slow and we have WSUS to push out updates). Alternatively, you create a new admin install point for SP1 and start deploying from there. You now have 2 install points and have to make sure that machines are picking up from the right one. If you have a standard group policy to push out packages and you update it ready for new machines it forces a re-deploy for the old ones.

Office 2007 gets round this; it copies everything to the local hard disc, MSPs and all, and installs it from there. If new updates come out you put them on your server share; new machines will get them, older machines get updated through WSUS and all is well.

It does have to do more work for the initial install (every machine has to do the patching rather than just the one admin install) but it's probably faster (running the process from local hard drive rather than over a network)

I still don't like it :-(