05.22.08

Don’t Like How they broke GP-based Deployment of Office 2007?

Posted in Office at 6:06 am by Administrator

If you are one of the many IT administrators I’ve talked to that doesn’t like how Microsoft essentially broke Group Policy Software Installation-based deployment of Office when they released Office 2007, here’s how you can provide feedback to Microsoft. I just noticed a blog posting from someone on the Office Resource Kit team with the title, "Deploying Office 2007 with GPSI is not for the faint of heart ". For someone from the Office Resource Kit team to use that kind of title is what I would call irony. I encourage everyone that finds what they did with Office deployment in the latest version just plain non-responsive to customer needs, to submit a comment to that blog posting. I think if they knew how many people were adversely affected by this decision, they would perhaps get around to providing some better deployment solutions than recommending yet another deployment product for folks to install!

 

Tags

Group Policy, Office 2007, GPSI

10.15.07

MS makes Office 2007 ADMXs available (finally)

Posted in Office at 6:29 am by Administrator

Microsoft has finally shipped some ADMX template files for configuring Office 2007! They are available here. That’s good news–now you can use the new template format to customize Office 2007 deployments in your Vista environments without dragging around ADM files in every GPO.

As you may know, one of the downsides of the old ADM files is that they were copied into the SYSVOL portion of each GPO that used them. This meant a lot of duplicate ADM files in your GPOs, replicating 2-3MB of stuff to every DC. ADMX files do away with that in Vista and Windows Server 2008. When you’re editing GPOs in those environments, the ADMX files are referenced from either the c:\windows\policydefinitions location or from something called the Central Store. The "Central Store" is a folder you create manually in SYSVOL (or you can use my free Central Store Creator Utility) and can be referenced by any administrator editing policy from Vista or Server 2008. Now that Microsoft has shipped Office ADMX files, you don’t have to have Office ADMs running around every GPO in SYSVOL–you can put them in your Central Store and away you go!

Tags

Group Policy, Microsoft Office 2007, ADMX, GPOGUY