Merge Office 2003 Standard / Professional

[Asin]

Is there a way to merge Office 2003 Standard and Professional Administrative Installation Points before or after the updates or slipstreamed?

I want to have installation points for both but reduce the size that they both take up.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[keytotime]

Office Pro contains all the component's of office Standard and more, so there is no reason to bother with the Office standard AIP, if you are doing an office pro one.

[Asin]

Right, but recofiguring Office 2003 Pro after the setup takes time. As well as installing the applications that do not exist in Standard.

[keytotime]

See this:

http://unattended.msfn.org/intermediate/ap...03_advanced.htm

Search around.

Edited August 16, 2005 by keytotime

[Asin]

I've already read through most of the website. And all of it in terms of Office and Simple Unattended and Device Drivers.

Maybe I'm moving too quickly too fast considering I only started doing this last week.

To be honest, I don't see anything that would help other than the Office shrinking programs which I will look into later once I am successful in reducing two Administrative Installation Points to one.

[gfincher]

Since you are using Admin install points, I assume that you also are using Volume License media in a corporate environment? If so, then you do know that you may have licensing issues if you use Office Professional installs to what would be your Standard licensed seats? I would recommend that you move away from an Admin install point and copy the contents of the CD's to two separate shared folders & then get the benefit of the Local Install Source (LIS) method of installation. LIS is the recommended method of install for Office 2003 & will reportedly be the ONLY method of install for future versions of Office. The compressed cab files take up less room on the server anyway, and LIS improves the "patch story".

Don't waste time trying to build what may be an unsupported and unsupportable deployment mechanism.

my .02 ...

gfincher

[Asin]

Actually, we just have the software and the serials for Office 2003 Suites which includes Standard and Professional.

I don't quite know what you mean by seats though.

I probably should just leave these two alone since the transform files are most likely different anyways.

[gfincher]

I don't quite know what you mean by seats though.

What I mean is that a company licenses either Office Standard or Office Professional for a certain # of users == seats. And... that installing from an Office Professional install point to Office Standard users is not allowed by license. License compliance is a huge issue in most orporations today; some industries require item, not just software vendors.

And... yes... you should leave them as separate install sources, but this sure complicates your install structure. I would definitely recommend looking into the LIS method of installation. Details here:

Taking Advantage of a Local Install Source