Deploying Office 2003 system professional

[manners]

Hello.

We will shortly be rolling out office 2003 and have a question. We want to use group policy to assign it to users so its installed on next document incovation or from a start menu shortcut etc. All users currently have a mix of either office xp or office 2000. My question is will the deployment upgrade the current install or will it not work due to office already being installed - i.e document invocation will just load up the current install of office rather than deploying 2003. Will we have to manually uninstall current versions?. thanks in advance.

 

[madongolf]

If you have existing version of Office which you want to keep you will need to create a trasmform file using the Custom Installation Wizard from the Office 2003 resource kit , this will enable you to make sure that old version are kept except of course for Outlook because version of Outlook cannot coexist, also when invoking the command line
setup.exe transforms=Office2003.mst you will need to add NoFeatureStateMigration =1

 

[manners]

OK thanks, we are upgrading the entire platform to Office 2003, including Project, Visio, Outlook and the rest of the office suite.

Current versions of office that have been deployed unfortuantly were not done using a GPO, they were done using a software distribution point on our server.

So as we are not wanting to keep any existing platform we can just go ahead and use a GPO to assign it to users?

Thanks

 

[mikiemov]

I have the same query..anyone have an answer ??

 

[snowone]

Yes you can deploy via GPO, most commonly to computers vs Users. You most likely will want to download the Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit, which include Custom Install Wizard, allowing you to specify removal of existing installs, add packages, define install options, enter keys, etc etc. There is alsos manaul removal tool you could run prior to.

It's all here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011402981033.aspx

Also, if you plan to use WSUS vs. SMS or similar for patch management, take note of "Local Installation Source" vs. Admin Install Point:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011402031033.aspx

Good luck.