A Custom Office SP1 Deployment

Paul Robichaux's article "Streamline Custom Office 2003 Deployments" (October 2004, InstantDoc ID 43878) provides a great overview of how to use the Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit's Custom Installation Wizard (CIW). However, I needed to include Service Pack 1 (SP1) in my deployment of Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003. To do so, I determined that I had to run the Office Professional Edition 2003 setup utility (setuppro.exe) with the /a switch to create an administrative installation point, then add the SP1 files to the directory containing the installed files.

First, I downloaded the full version of SP1 and used WinZip to extract the files. I had to slip two files—mainsp1ff.msp and owc11sp1ff.msp—into the installation directory, so I ran the commands

msiexec /p
 X:\SourceDirectory\mainsp1ff.msp
 /a Y:\DestinationDirectory\pro11.msi
 shortfilenames=true /qb
msiexec /p
 X:\SourceDirectory\owc11s1ff.msp
 /a Y:\DestinationDirectory\owc11.msi
 shortfilenames=true /qb

where SourceDirectory is the location of the extracted SP1 files and DestinationDirectory is the Office Professional Edition 2003 administrative installation point.

To my surprise, I didn't receive any notification that the commands succeeded. But they did because now the installation point contains Office Professional Edition 2003 with SP1. The total size is 630MB, so I can easily burn it to a CD-ROM.

—Todd Atteberry
todd_atteberry@yahoo.com

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