ON CAHCED INSTALL and Administrative Install Points --------------------------------------------------- Microsoft has 2 differnt strategies for patching Office 2003. 1) Optomized for high-availability LAN 2) Optomized for low-availability LAN, slow-links, mobile, etc. Option 1 and Option 2 are mutually exclusive. You must use one or the other. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutio...ade_5.mspx#EEAA Option 2 assumes you don't have a lot of bandwidth available and/or that you may be without LAN connectivity from time to time. It compensates for this with LIS (Local Install Sources). LIS keeps a copy of the media on your Local system. The patching stratergy here is based on the same assumption, no connectivity. This istall method favors patches and hotfixes. These are small and install individually. This is the right choice for mobile users or users with slow links. Option 1 assumes you have a reasonably fast network available all the time. In this situation the network sources are updated en mass. The large scale changes can be easily pushed to the client without as much worry over validation and traffic interruption. THAT is why you can make an administrative install point and install SP1 or SP2 to it. Once again, Option 1 and Option 2 are mutually exclusive. Therefore if you create an Administrative install point and slipstream it, you have chosen Option 1 and cannot benefit from LIS (Cached install) On another note: Only Volume License copies of Office can be used for an Administrative install point. You can't buy it in the store and do these procedures. Now what's my motivation in all this? I'm hoping somebody out there will prove me wrong and show me how to slipstream an SP2 install then repackage it to a compressed CD image that is capable of utilizing the LSI model. Like the rest of you, I want the best of both worlds.
