Office 2003 and SP2 via GPO

[Harrison Midkiff]

Hello:

I deployed Office 2003 via a GPO. It worked great. Now SP2 for Office 2003
is out. Does anyone know how to deploy or roll this service pack into an
existing GPO.

Harrison Midkiff

 

[Ken B]

I'm probably in the same boat as you...

I didn't use an admin installation point... I just copied the Office 2003 CD
to a network share, made a transform file, and deployed it that way. Seems
to work pretty well. I'm going to eventually need to put out SP1 & 2 for it
(have to do some reading on that to see if it's like Office XP sp's that you
have to have sp1 to install sp2).

.... That, and is there a MSI file that it creates that I can deploy as well?

Ken

 

[Cary Shultz [A.D. MVP]]

Harrison,

Assuming that you made an Administrative Installation of Office 2003 all you
need to do is to apply the SP2 to it ( via msiexec.exe ) and then go to the
GPO and select 'Redeploy App'. So, the next time that the computer is
rebooted or the user logs on the updates Office 2003 will be deployed.

Does this make any sense to you?

HTH,

Cary

 

[Cary Shultz [A.D. MVP]]

Ken,

While this is not a bad solution, it is not making full use of the power
under the hood that you have available to you. It is much much much more
efficient to make the Administrative Installation and use GPO to deploy
Office. With an Administrative Installation you can apply patches and
Service Packs to the Admin Install and then simply redeploy it via the GPO.

The way that you have done it....not sure that you can even apply patches
and / or Service Packs. I would think that you would not be able to....But
I have never done it that way so I can not speak from experience. Just
pretty sure that you would not be able to do that!

You might want to consider doing this over. Do the Administrative
Installation and apply SP2 to it. Then create a GPO to deploy it. This way
you do not need to worry about going to each and every workstation and
running the msiexec /i ..... command or putting it in a logon script or
whatnot.

HTH,

Cary

 

[Ken B]

I think this is going to have to wait 'til we phase out Access 97--we're
still stuck here with the security settings and whatnot that are not
afforded in later versions of Access.

I'm _HOPING_ that phase out will occur in 2005 (would be nice to not be
using an 8 year old product when we have licensing for the newest [latest &
greatest] available).

We'll see what happens... 2003 out of the box seems to work pretty well as
is... only one user has said something about Outlook crashing. I can apply
the updates on her computer alone for the time being.

Thanks again for your help--much appreciated!

Ken

 

[Harrison Midkiff]

Cary:

That was it. I tested it in my lab and it worked perfectly. I found the
following like which tells exactly how to update the Administrative
Installation.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/updates/patch_o2k3.htm

Thanks again....

Harrison Midkiff