Deploying Office 2007 in Group Policy Software Installation
For those of you really on the bleeding edge, you may have already discovered some changes in the way customize and deploy Office 2007 via the GP Software Installation feature. This article details the steps you need to take, but I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight some of the key differences:
- When you create an installation point on a server for Office 2007, there is no longer the notion of the Administrative Installation using the setup /a option. For O2K7, you simply copy the contents of the CD to the distribution point and you're done.
- To customize which apps get installed by the user or computer during GP processing, you used to create a transform file (.mst) using the Office Custom Installation Wizard. Transforms go away in O2K7. Instead there is a config.xml file you need to customize and place in the same folder where you installation files are. This XML file controls what gets installed on the client. It has very limited configuration options so don't be surprised about what you can't do here.
- You can only deploy Office 2007 via GP on a per-computer basis. Per user deployments simply fail. I haven't investigated why this is, but I suspect it may have something to do with UAC limitations. More on this when I do some more research.
All in all, I'm not clear why the Office 2007 GP support is so crappy, but I hope to dig in a little deeper when I get some time and find out what's up.