upgrading office 2000 to office 2003 -Citrix MF XP FR3

[hellboy101]

Hello all-

I have 4 servers in my Citrix farm Windows 2K SP4 running Citrix metaframe XP FR3. Would like to upgrade from Office 2000 to Office 2003. My users desktops are published.. So I suppose the general question is - what is my best practice measure to get this started.

Can I just upgrade over from office 2k to office 2k3? Would need to uninstall the app on all servers and do a fresh installation.

If I do this.. what happens to my user's profiles for email or anything related to Office? I'm reading more and more about creating a transform (mst) set.. would I need to do this considering i've already got established users but because I'm upgrading to office 2003 there would be a need to run this transform?

Any suggestions to these pertinent questions would be most appreciated. thanks so much!

hb101

 

[bofaurholt]

Hi

Since Office 2003 is a major upgrade I would always do a clean install.

In fact, since you have 4 citrix servers I would actually take this opportunity to reinstall all the servers with a totally clean office installation, one by one(if it is possible in your environment).
With 4 Citrix servers ,I guess that you are using roaming profiles, so the users Office Settings is stored here, and won't be deleted with a reinstall.

With Office 2003 there is no requirements/need to use a MST file. BTW! - Office 2000 does require a MST file-


/regards Bo

 

[patrickrouse]

Just because there is no requirement to use an MST, doesn't mean that you shouldn't. It's quite a clean process to upgrade from one office suite to another using the custom installation wizard.

I'd highly recommend testing the process thoroughly before running against your production farm.

That being said, there's nothing wrong with creating a new system image and deploying via clean install. Even if you do this, you should use the Custom Install Wizard to make a silent install that accomidates user's current Outlook Profiles and office settings.



Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server

http://www.sessioncomputing.com