Deploying office 2007

Hi,

You have a tough job.
First you need to uninstall Office 2003. Then you have to install Office 2007.
Office 2003 uninstall will leave a lot of mess, and the installation of 2007 will be a hard job.
Best you can do is build a new image and deploy that.
Second you can do is get yourselve SVS and build a 2007 package.
Just deploy that one.
If you fail in some of the tasks, your users will still have the ability to use 2007.

Regards
Erik
www.DinamiQs.com

Are you kidding? Why not just run an upgrade to Office 2003, that way no settings are lost. Create a msp file by running the setup with admin switch (setup.exe -admin). Go through and modify all the settings the way you like and save it as an msp file in the Updates folder (I am assuming you are saving the installation files to a network share). Then all you have to do is make a task/package to run the setup file, it will automatically uninstall 2003, and install 2007 reserving all the settings.

I would love to recommend SVS as it can make things a bunch easier, but I am currently having problems with it and Office. I also heard but have not seen yet that the research function in a 2007 layer does not work. If you make an SVS of 2007, make sure you do an extensive amount of testing with it.

...assuming you're not completely new to Altiris. The hardest part (in my opinion) will be setting up your Office 2007 install package. There is extensive documentation available from Microsoft on how to customize the Office 2007 setup package, and a nice document on how to deploy it using SMS. The principles they use in SMS are basically the same as you use with Altiris Software Delivery. First you need to be sure you have a volume licensed copy of Office 2007; a retail one-user copy won't work. Run setup.exe /admin to launch the Office Customizer utility. You'll want a partially silent install, and the O2K7 installer will automatically remove prior Office versions for you if you configure it to do so, which is the default (though we have had some occasional problems with that; if we had to do it over we probably would have run a script to uninstall the existing Office versions first, then launch the Office 2007 installer). Save the file from the OCT to the \Updates directory (along with the extracted SP1 .msp files and any other hotfixes you want to install during the rollout). In your Software Delivery Package, setup the command line to just run setup.exe with success codes of 0 and 3010.

Is there a reason that you are using Notification Server instead of Deployment Server?

https://www-secure.symantec.com/community/article/...

I would say that for any computer currently on the network, the NS is better for deploying software then the DS. The NS would allow a computer to download all the needed files prior to the upgrade, and then remote users would still get upgraded at the specified time. So if I set up a job and my computer gets all the files needed from the NS. I can take my laptop home, and I will still get upgraded even if I am not on the network. The DS can not do that. Nor does it have bandwidth throtalling. That would be the reason I never use the DS to push out anything other then intial deployment.

It's not as hard as everyone is making it seem. You can create the Admin share (a network share accessible by all users) and then write a wise script to call the setup.exe from that share. It can all be done silently without user interaction. It's built into office that it will automatically upgrade (actually uninstall) your old office components and then install the new ones. I can post the script on Juice under packaging and all you need to do is modify the network share location.

Emily Duncan
Sidley Austin LLP
Software Deployment Developer

I wouldn't recommend virtualizing Office2K7 just yet, when the application self heals, it heals outside the virtual layer and writes to the local machine as well as registry. So even if you de-activate the layer, you will now have files and reg entries installed on the local machine.