Office 2003 to 2007 Upgrade

[lafleur1977]

Hello,

 

We are planning to upgrade from office 2003 to 2007 shortly as we have been running both versions in different areas for a while. Many of our classroom computers run office 2003 and I am just wondering of the best way to go about upgrading. Installing 2007 via GP is an option but it doesn't remove 2003 if its already installed. I thought of possibly writing a removal script for 2003 and then installing 2007 via script or GP...

 

Just wondering if anybody has any ideas if they have done something similar before?

 

Thanks

[maark]

If 2003 was installed by group policy then you could remove it by removing the gpo and making sure the remove when falls out of scope option is enabled.

Office 2007 and 2010 are not that easy to install through group policy though - microsoft recommend installing on an image - reimaging or manual install may be your best option.

[lafleur1977]

If 2003 was installed by group policy then you could remove it by removing the gpo and making sure the remove when falls out of scope option is enabled.

Office 2007 and 2010 are not that easy to install through group policy though - microsoft recommend installing on an image - reimaging or manual install may be your best option.

 

Unfortunately office 2003 was not installed via GPO so I can't use that option which would be great. We are going to update some of our images with 2007 but not all. I have installed 2007 with no problems in the past via GPO. What kind of problems can it cause by doing it this way?

 

Thanks

[maark]

Don't think it causes problems installing by gpo just that a lot of people struggled to get it to roll out properly

[FN-GM]

This link will help. It is for office 2010 but it still does apply to 2007. You will the have the option to remove older versions.How to deploy office 2010 using GPO and OCT. - Spiceworks Community

 

I myself have never had an issue pushing it out via group policy.

[sparkeh]

If you use the Office Customisation Toolkit you can remove old versions of Office as part of the install.

edit: beaten to it

[glennda]

without meaning to sound rude why are you going to 2007 and not straight to 2010? there is now Sp1 out for it and works brilliantly - use it completely across the site on 900 desktops without problems.

[SHimmer45]

either way the roll out method would be very similar,

 

when we upgraded from 2003 to 2007 the installer was put onto the network (no user intervention required) and then launched via a script.

we were fortunate that the upgrade was planned over the summer months when we do image refreshes in the major areas.

still meant a little bit of legwork.

 

2010 does work well with KMS activation if you have this already in place?

[FN-GM]

2010 does work well with KMS activation if you have this already in place?

 

Yep been perfect. I just had to use a script to reset the installation SID and it was good to go. Easy :-)

[lafleur1977]

We are considering 2010 in the future but currently some of our important applications don't officially support it.

[SHimmer45]

Yep been perfect. I just had to use a script to reset the installation SID and it was good to go. Easy :-)

in testing havent had to do this yet but have not tried it on any imaged machines which might have issues with SID's

 

Worth noting that the KMS license key makes the host its installed in publish itself as a KMS hosts which is fun when you have several machines advertising this in DNS

[FN-GM]

in testing havent had to do this yet but have not tried it on any imaged machines which might have issues with SID's

 

Might be worth bookmarking this: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/office-software/74238-solution-kms-activation-imaging-plus-error-0xc004f038.html

[SHimmer45]

dont sysprep the images currently (XP mind you) though W7 actually needs you to do this as part of the Default profile creation.

so no doubt this will come in handy

[glennda]

We are considering 2010 in the future but currently some of our important applications don't officially support it.

 

in that case personally I would hold off - we waited until Capita finally gave support for 2010 to sims but it worked fine before. its a lot of work to then be superseded soon.

[Blue_Cookeh]

I didn't have a great experience with Office 2007 in terms of reliability/stability, which seemed to have been greatly improved in Office 2010.

 

As others have said, I know it's not related to the original question, but it's worth holding off so you can jump straight to 2010 when everything officially does support it.

[lafleur1977]

in that case personally I would hold off - we waited until Capita finally gave support for 2010 to sims but it worked fine before. its a lot of work to then be superseded soon.

 

Sims is one of the applications that I thought didn't support 2010 but if it is then that would certainly be worth upgrading to

[lafleur1977]

Thanks for all your replies guys. I have been looking at the office customisation tool and found that to be really good

[glennda]

Sims is one of the applications that I thought didn't support 2010 but if it is then that would certainly be worth upgrading to

 

Since the Summer upgrade I believe.

[pcunite]

It has been a while, but in the past I used Altiris RIP images to install software. Basically, you install Office on a clean system and it turns that into a single .exe which you can deploy silently to a PC however you want. Naturally, you can do this on a system with 2007 already present and it will build an executed to do upgrading.