Office 2007 installed on shared drive?

[Ben-BSH]

Anyone tried installing Office 2007 to a share then getting users to run it from there?

 

is there a limit to the connections? basically, we would rather not have to RIS and then install Office 2007 to every PC in our building, so this could be one solution, to get round that.

 

(we have several issues installing Office 2007 on our PC's which usually requires a clean build to get many things inside the suite working)

[elsiegee40]

My intial worry would be slowing things down due to drive contention, especially on a large network?

[Ben-BSH]

We thought about that, and considered perhaps a few install's. for example, the staff start menu would point to Office install 2, students to Office install 1, sixth formers to another, etc.

[elsiegee40]

It's still an awful lot of network traffic. Office is one of those sets of software that is in constant use by everyone. It could slow things down big time without even considering the disk contention.

 

Using different shares would separate things, but really you would be looking at separate physical disks, if not servers to actually make any difference to the contention.

 

I suppose some schools using thin clients must be doing this, I wonder how they get on. Maybe it doesn't cause that many probblems after all?

[AngryTechnician]

Forget the traffic; Office simply isn't designed to be run that way.

 

1. Find a machine without Office installed
   
2. Connect to the \\computer\c$ share on a machine that currently has Office installed
   
3. Browse to Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 and run Winword.exe
   

 

You will immediately be presented with a dialog stating that "The operating system is not presently configured to run this application". Office 2007 contains a plethora of components that have to be properly installed and registered on the individual machine. It is in no way a program you can simply run off of a shared drive.

 

If you're determined not to install on each machine, your best bet is to use an application virtualisation system such as App-V. It's possible this way, but not easy.

[Ben-BSH]

Ideal. thanks guys

[featured_spectre]

App-V is a very long winded route, in fact in some cases it is even longer to go via App-V than installing it on each machine...

 

Just a thought, why not have a set of images for example

 

Staff have Image A which has Windows 7, Office 07, SIMS, etc

Students have Image B which has Windows 7, office 07, photoshop etc

Sixth Form have Image C which has Windows 7, office 07, photoshop, sibelius etc

 

And blitz said images on relevant machines, and have mandatory profiles going everywhere.

 

That way you can have each machine running at peak efficiency

[elsiegee40]

Nephilim is right... the image is the best way forward, I think... works fine IF all your kit for a certain image is identical.

 

A school like mine where you have right hotchpotch isn't great for that. Office is installed here using GPO, it's straightforward enough.