Software Deployment

Don't repackage your office applications. You'll probably get lousy results and you'll loose lots of the advantages of the original .msi packages...

Edit and customize your installations with the Office Resource Kit. See more about it here.

Hope that helps

Rpf is right!, as per the best practices its advisable that we should not repackage the vendor provided MSI's moreover MS gives most of its office suites in MSI format, the best way is to create a transform(MST) file using their own ORK kit available for free...

NEVER repackage Office apps. You will lose the ability to apply Microsoft patches to them. Some of the patches that are released are critical due to security reasons, and you will not have time to try to figure out what they do and repackage them. As rp said, use the ORK for office apps

I would say use office resource kit, we have done this at your work.... for office xp, outlook 2003, project 2003.. they all work just fine.... i hope that helps

For Office XP SP3 SMS push, could you create a script that will not push the package to the desktop until the user close all running Office XP programs.

For Office XP SP3 SMS push, could you create a script that will not push the package to the desktop until the user close all running Office XP programs.

Would this has to be done on a "Clean" machine or not? Also, should I have to have the Office installed on the machine first or just the ORK installation? I noticed that when I finished, I did not see a particular file that I will deploy to the users' machines via SMS. Instead, I had a bunch of files and I am wondering which of these files would be deployed to the machines. to make get Office installed.

Please advice.

You will need to deploy all of the files. Whether or not you have office installed on the machine when you ran the ORK is irrelevant. The ORK will generate a .MST file and a command line to install office. It will probably look something like:

msiexec /i pro11.msi TRANSFORMS=<YOURTRANSFORM.MST> /qb-