Office 2003 deployed by GP

[Guest]

We currently have Office 2000 SP3 installed on our work computers. This was
deployed using a login script and a MST file. We would now like to deploy
Office 2003 SP1 using Group Policies and an MST file.

The install of Office 2003 works fine but it is not un-installing the Office
2000 program. I have configured the MST file to un-install previous versions
and I have selected in the GP that Office 2003 is an upgrade. Apart from the
problem of Office 2000 still being in the Add/Remove Programs section there
are also icons in START-PROGRAMS that when clicked start the old version off
Office. This is obviously not a good thing and would drive our users crazy.

On one machine I installed Office 2003 directly off CD. Office 2000 was not
removed on this PC either.

Can anyone suggest a way to un-install Office 2000 either during the Office
2003 install or immediately after?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Johnny

 

[Cary Shultz [A.D. MVP]]

Johnny,

I would have to play with this a bit to get things absolutely straight but I
think this is what is going on:

You are installing Office 2000 SP3 via a logon script and .mst file. I am
sure that there is an AIS ( for Office 2000 ) somewhere and you are
'pulling' it from there. Since Office 2000 SP3 was not installed via GPO
then you can not really use the Office 2003 GPO to 1) remove Office 2000 or
2) to upgrade the existing installation. I am very sure about 1) and pretty
sure about 2). I have never done an upgrade like this ( and am not sure
that you can...can someone confirm or refute this ).

Normally what you would do would be to install Office 2000 via GPO to your
clients ( either to the user-configuration or to the computer-configuration
side of things ) and then create a GPO to 'upgrade' that installation to
Office 2003. Now, this is where I am not exactly sure of what is happening.
I am pretty sure that by 'upgrading' you are actually removing Office 2000
and replacing it with an installation of Office 2003. If you pay attention
to the screen on the computer where this is happening you will see "removing
managed application Office 2000" and then "installing managed application
Office 2003". You do this by using the upgrade tab in the GPO and
specifying the GPO that it will 'upgrade'. At least, this is how I have
always done it.

But, I am sure that you know this already and that this does not help you.

I have worked on computers where Office 2000 Small Business was installed,
then Office 2000 Professional was installed and finally Office XP
Professional was installed. All of this manually. It was a mess. All
installed versions of Office showed up in the Add/Remove programs and there
were several entries in the Start | Programs area. I just manually removed
all of the installed versions of Office and cleaned things up with the nice
little utility that comes with the Office Resource Kit. That removed some
15MB of lingering files and registry entries for each install.

Let me play with this. It might be a couple of days before I have time to
do this. I have a few other things going on as well.

Cary