Administrative Installation of Office 2003: Licensing

[BdN3504]

My Setup is as follows:

I'm working as an employee for an MAPS (Ms Action Pack Subscriber). We have several licenses for Microsoft Office Professional, all labeled "Microsoft Partner Programme". I have created a test environment with two virtual machines, one Windows Server 2008 Standard Build 6002 and a Win XP SP3 machine. I have created a domain in which the Server acts as DC and the WinXP machine is a client for multiple users. I have been able to successfully create an administrative installation of Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.3.3, which has been successfully deployed to the XP Client, too.

Now I want to reproduce this success with an administrative installation of MS Office 2003 Professional. But when I try executing an administrative installation by running setup.exe /a, I get an error reading:

Installation-Images for administrative installations can only be created with Enterprise Versions of Microsoft office 2003. (my own translation of )

after i have entered the license key which is delivered with the action pack.

I called Microsoft, but the guy i was talking to could not tell me how to create an administrative installation with Office 2k3 Pro and told me to either search through the MS Partner forums or contact a distributor and acquire an enterprise version of the product. This guy also told me that office 2k3 isn't officially supported anymore and that there would also be a chance that i get an enterprise edition from msdn.

I thought that I'd ask here first, if anybody knows about the licensing needed for administrative installations of office 2k3 products. Is there really no other way than buying an enterprise edition?

[cluberti]

For Office 2003, only Office Processional Enterprise editions are licensed to create and deploy from administrative installation points, that is correct. I believe your MAPS gives you the Professional version, and not Professional Enterprise.

Also, it did go into extended support in April of 2009, but it's still "supported". It's just not going to get any bugfixes or design changes, only security fixes (until 2014).