MS Office 2000 SP3

[Knick8man]

Please help. I am trying to repackage MS Office 2000 sp3 for AD distribution. The build appers to complete correctly, and distribution to the target machines appears to succeed, but the sp does not "register" with the target machine. (Office indicates that it is at the sr-3 level, and file versions increase to the expected release number, but patches that require sp3 will not install, giving the error that, "The expected version of product was not found." Also, the MBSA does not acknowledge sp3 being installed.) I have tried both snapshot and install monitoring methods. What am I missing?

[David_Thornley]

MSI patches find products to patch by using the product code of installation. If you repackage Office you would get a new MSI package and therefore a new product code. The office installation is already an MSI installation, you may want to consider deploying it via active directory without repackaging it.

[Christopher_Pai]

MS Office 2000 is already an MSI based install so repackaging would not be reccommended. Have you considered making an administrative install and then placing the admin MSI into the GPO?

Personally I reccomend SMS over AD GPO and I don't really like administrative installs anyways. You can always read on my blog a technique that I use for patching office installations.