Deploying office 2007 across through GPO to RIS imaged PC's

[tosca925]

All our clients, laptop or PC's are deployed by RIS. THey all have office 2003 on them which is loaded and Service packed as part of the image we create. With the probability of office 2007 being wanted on a lot of these machines in the near future I need a little advice.

 

Should i be able to deploy 2007 through GPO to these machines that allready have 2003 as part of the RIS image. Is this do-able and if so has anyone already doen it?

[Oops_my_bad]

On the office 2007 Cd you can run setup /admin - this runs a nifty little utility that you can set things (like remove previous office 2003) and then creates an MST. Only problem i've found is I had to run it twice before it will actually "run"

[tosca925]

Only problem i've found is I had to run it twice before it will actually "run"

 

Can you explain more?

[Norphy]

Thing is, the setup /admin routine doesn't create an MST, it creates an MSP. MSPs can't be applied using group policy deployment, pretty much the only way to install Office 2007 with the MSP is to run the installation routine as a startup script which is a pretty ugly way of doing it imo.

 

To do an unattended install suitable for group policy deployment, you have to edit the various XML files which sit in the ProPlus.ww (or whatever version you have) folder.

 

Technet article here