Silent Office 2003 deployment through SMS

[billybarty]

I have created an administrative install point of Office 2003 on our network and created an mst file for the install. I then created a package and advertisement in SMS for the install but it is not working. It appears in advertised programs but when you try to run it, it just flashes and goes away. Do I have this wrong? Is the admin install only used for installs using GPO and do I have to use the SMS installer to creat packages for SMS 2003?
Also, when creating the transform file I don't see where to enter a switch for silent install. I don't know what the switches are for installation options. Any help using SMS and creating packages is appreciated.

 

[cixelsydmai]

billy,

I recently started working on SMS and this is how we got Office 2003. We used the custom Office 2003 Resource Kit to create a custom install file using the program that was in the resource kit:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/e/d/0eda9ae6-f5c9-44be-98c7-ccc3016a296a/ork.exe

Once we got the unattended install setup file created, we just used the .SMS file that was also included in the Office Resource Kit to create the package.
We then copied the custom files into where we had stored the source on the SMS server.
Afterwards, under programs for the package, we then told SMS to use the setup file that we created using with the custom installer program, and then advertised that custom setup file - I cannot remember the command like switches we used, but I believe we left those standart.
Once the advertisement showed up on the 2k and XP machines, and you ran it, the only thing you would see would be the Office setup executable (ORE.exe was its name I believe) in the task manager, and a little while later Office 2003 with all the options was installed completely unattended.
I can go and check what exactly the switches were we used, just let me know;
Hope that helped,

Sven

 

[billybarty]

I have started using the resource kit to creat the custom install. It starts out looking for the msi file location. You mention you store the source on the server. Is this the entire install cd and the location you point to for the msi file and is there a preferred location to store the source files?
Also, the .sms file you mention, is it created while you make the package?
I know these are a lot of questions and I appreciate your help on this. And I'll take you up on your original offer of the switches for the silent install.