3-9-09

I have successfully deployed Office 2007 on several machines using the following steps:

Copy the Microsoft Office 2007 Installer files to a network share.

From a machine with admin permissions to the share, run this command:
\\servername\ShareName\setup /admin

This will open the Office Customization Tool.

Choose "Create a new Setup customization file for the following product"
Product: Microsoft Office Standard 2007 (or whatever version of Office you are installing)

Configure the Office Customization Tool with your preferences.

Save your preferences (a .msp file) in the \\servername\ShareName\Updates folder.

Microsoft recommends using a file name that starts with something like 1_ to make sure this file will always be the first file alphabetically (if you add updates to the Updates folder).

If you are installing a customization patch in conjunction with Office updates, you should change the file name of the customization patch to ensure that it is installed first. For example, change Custom.MSP to 1_Custom.MSP.

On a target machine, run this command:
\\Servername\ShareName\setup

Office 2007 will be installed on the target machine (if you left the default uninstall preferences in the OCT, the previous version of Office is uninstalled first).


If you want to go 1 step further & install Office 2007 with its updates & patches, you can also do the following:

After Office 2007 is installed, use Microsoft Updates or WSUS to install all of the current updates & patches to the Office 2007 suite on the target machine.

Go to the Event log on the target machine and look in the Applications log for all Windows Updates messages. Note the KB number of each Office related update and go to www.microsoft.com/downloads and search for each KB number.

Download each update installer and then run each installer with this command:
Path\InstallerName /extract:Path
(Full instructions for this are here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178995.aspx - look for the section called Updates Folder)

That will create (extract) .msp files for each Office update installer.

Place all the update installers & all of the .msp files in the Updates folder of the network share.

Now when you run the setup program on successive target machines (using \\servername\ShareName\setup) , it will install Office 2007 and all of its updates at the same time.

I'm finding this to take about a half hour per machine.