checking to see if sp3 for office 2003 is installed

[net_user]

i need to check remote computers here at work to see if the sp3 for office2003 is installed.

anyone have any ideas how to do this checking?

[Monty Carter]

The first thing I found doesn't exactly require just a short one-line snippet of code, depending on how precise you want to be.

This initial solution basically involves checking the version number on the executable for each application in Office. The problem is, that each application has a different version number indicating which service pack it is on.

If you are just checking for the SP on the core apps (word, excel, powerpoint), the code could be fairly short. However, if you need to ensure that every app is on SP3, you'll have some work to do.

Don't know what language you intend to use, so I can't give you any more detailed suggestions on the code, other than to say define variables for each exe version number for each SP. (For example, wordSP1=1.2.3, wordSP2=1.2.4, wordSP3=1.2.6) Then, check the version on the file and see which variable it matches. (If SPword==wordSP3, then give a gold star, or whatever it is you intend to do with this knowledge.)

Oh, the link to the actual info you asked for... : How to check the version of Office 2003 products

Forgot to mention... The potential problem with detecting just one application version may be this: Say on most machines Office Standard is installed. Six months go by, and you upgrade everybody to SP3. Then, a user requests Visio, or something. You install it. Now, does Visio have SP3 installed if you don't run the SP3 installer again? I actually don't know, but I would certainly research it before deploying changes across my organization.

Edited December 22, 2009 by Monty Carter