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Question

Office 2004 Update

  • February 5, 2007
  • 1 reply
  • 30 views
A
  • Anonymous

Wanted to see how most Casper users run Office updates in their environment.
Need to run the latest Office update. Up to now I've been running the update
on one machine and use ARD to push ŒMicrosoft Office 2004' folder with the
update to machines that don't have it.

Any suggestions is appreciated,

BTW, we are still on Panther and using PPC Macs.

Thanx in advance,
Cyrus

    1 reply

    talkingmoose
    Forum|alt.badge.img+36
    • talkingmoose
    • Community Manager
    • 1913 replies
    • February 6, 2007

    Like David, we're building a new full package. I'm using Casper to simply
    uninstall the old and install the new.

    Someone asked me just yesterday why we don't just do a diffs package that
    updates only needed components and then use ARD to push the new package.
    These are my reasons:

    1. While I didn't know about the script on MacEnterprise that David referred
      to I did look at the Vise log and I really didn't want to have to parse it
      pull the changed components. I would then have two packages that I'd have to
      maintain rather than one. Or I'd have multiple packages to incrementally
      update a base package. To me, less is more and the Microsoft Office
      installation is soooo simple that I can easily work on a package manually if
      I need to.

    2. We maintain a Frankenstein set of workstations running custom software
      and rely on Casper heavily to make small changes 2-3 times or more per week.
      I'm not crazy about uninstalling a 500MB Office package and then
      reinstalling another 500MB Office package across the network for dozens of
      machines but I don't want to change my method for one large package that
      gets installed occasionally compared to many many smaller (<10MB) packages
      that get pushed out all the time.

    3. I want to maintain the ability to roll back. If I were to push a diffs
      package that for some reason breaks after the rollout I would then have to
      uninstall multiple packages and then reinstall multiple packages just to
      roll back. By doing the entire package, I can uninstall one large package
      and install one large package.

    4. In our testing here, uninstalling the older version and installing the
      newer version takes less than four minutes on a 100MB network. This is
      acceptable to me.

    bill
    -- William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
    Digital Information Systems Support
    Merrill Communications, LLC
    (651) 632-1492


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