Admin Studio and Office 2003 w/ SMS

[tprzybylak]

first question... i'm running SMS 2003 and want to deploy apps. that's it. did I overbuy with Admin studio?

On that note... I have a new installation of admin studio and SMS 2003 for deployment. I'm a noob to both... and as I'm sure you can appreciate, it's already a long road.

I am trying to package... or "repackage" office 2003. I find the MSI, get it going, etc... and it actually deploys via SMS for me! Amazing!

BUT when a user tries to run office, it prompts for User/Location/Office Product ID code. Where in Admin Studio can I put this information in where it does not prompt the user for this? We are part of the MS Enterprise Agreement, and have one code for everything. |
Thoughts?
thanks for the great and already helpful forums! It's a shame that I dumped an additional TWO GRAND on support, but here... hours later... I haven't heard back from anyone. I pay MUCH less for upgraded support on other products and get literally instant responses.
Shameful.
thanks
_Tom

[Christopher_Pai]

You don't repackage MSI's generally ( unless its a really, really terrible MSI ). You create a transform ( use admin studios tuner ) instead or you simply pass MSI properties at the command line.

In office 2003 you are looking to populate a property called PIDKEY with your product key ( without the hyphens )

Off the top of my head a cmdline would look something like

msiexec /i PRO11.msi TRANSFORMS=mytrans.mst /QN

or

msiexec /i PRO11.msi PIDKEY=1124125125616123623672 /QN

Microsoft also provides a deployment kit with Office 2003 that contains a wizard utility to create its own transform without using Admin Studio.


And when you have this all figured out you also need to give consideration to MSI Sourcelist management using the SMS 2003 advanced client and some wierd behavior regarding local Dp's vs remote Dp's. I've built an entire framework tieing WBEM / MBSA - Office Scanner / SMS 2003 and MSI for a very sweet office deployment, maintenance and patching system.

[Jennifer_Watson]

Sounds like you should create a response transform using Tuner. This will allow you to enter in the informaiton a user would see if in setup, and it will populaye the necessary tables in the MST.

The other thing is that Office comes with its own Installer kit. Have you tried using that?

Regards, Jenn

[Christopher_Pai]

BTW, be sure to checkout my blog. I think you'll find the articles relevant.

[tprzybylak]

thanks to all for your advice.
Nice blog, Chris.

I found Microsoft's solution to this, and it seems to be quite easy. I am thinking that my conversations with Install Shield and my several thousand dollar purchase of this software is far beyond what I need it for. Interesting.
My fault.

In any event. I'm going to try this out. My first shot at it "fails" the program immediately when I advertise it to a client... the client goes to RUN and it instantly fails... in any event.. again.. that is SMS. No fault of adminstudio.