Planning your Office 2003 Deployment

It’s on the plate (along with about a billion other things, just like everyone else in this business), figure I might as well get some guidance.
And I was not disappointed in the least, lots of nifty features type things, but no real demos, that comes tommorrow. Local Installation Source (LIS) is now the reccommended way of installing, unless you have a good reason not to, which I think our computer labs have. The Profile Wizard is supposed to be able to make outlook profiles now, though I wonder how well that works when you have something installing the applications in another user context in the background. Patch managment (as usual) was also mentioned, with the contrast in LIS vs Admin install point being the major focus. OHOTFIX.EXE from the client install patches is the favored way to install, if you are using LIS, otherwise its the same old story of patch the admin share and reinstall on the client. Another nifty thing is chaining of installs directly in setup.ini, sounds useful for the lab installs where we have lots of duplicate machines that need exactly the same thing, but not so useful for admin machines where we need Frontpage here, Word there, Project here, etc.

Now for lunch and a session on either SQL 2005 Deployment or Group Policy Best Practices. It’s pretty much a coin toss at this point.

I’m also looking around at the chances for a Harbor Tour with Hornblower Tours, might skip out on the last session today and try to get there. Theres also the chance that both sessions will suck and I’ll head up there earlier than that.