Office 2011 Deployment

[bentoms]

Microsoft have released the Office 2011 suite early to some large accounts via licensing.Microsoft.com

As such, I wonder if anyone has any tips on how best to deploy this suite?Grey Communications Group Limited
Registered No. 1795794, Registered in England
Registered Office The Johnson Building, 77 Hatton Garden, London, EC1N 8JS
VAT Number GB 404 6245 78

[#2]

Ben, We have been beta testers of this for some months. A normal package
deployment works OK. It will depend on which if any MS Exchange you are
using. Some training in the added features will need to be undertaken,
especially if you are using MS OCS for groupware.

--
David Wikeley
Computer Systems Manager
Health Information Technology Services Unit (HITSU)
Faculty of Health Science/Menzies Research Institute
17 Liverpool Street, Hobart, Tasmania, 7001.
Private Bag 68
' (03) 62264751
Help Desk:6226 4888 ' Fax: 6226 4816 Email:healthit at utas.edu.au
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[talkingmoose]

Sounds like you're eager to jump the shark. The best tip I can offer is
On 9/24/10 2:36 AM, "Ben.Toms at grey.com" <Ben.Toms at grey.com> wrote:
"hold on!"

The download for volume license customers has only been available for a
week. No one's really had time to look at all the new features let alone
fully test deployment options and find the gotchas. You really need to be
familiar with some of the new features before you consider deployment.

--missing content--

same as Office 2008. Nothing appears to be different in this regard.

Of interest:

Office 2011 appears to have more investment in .plist preference files,
which offers the hope that using Casper and Managed Preferences (MCX) is
possible.

Outlook *requires* Exchange Server 2007 SP1, roll-up 4 or higher, because
it only supports the Exchange Web Services protocol. WebDAV is not
supported.

Volume license customers are receiving "Communicator" in addition to
"Messenger". Communicator is for OCS 2010. I'm not sure it will work with
anything earlier. For that you can still use Messenger.

Office installs browser plug-ins that are used in conjunction with
Sharepoint.

Although Office has been released to volume license customers, the NDA for
beta testers has not been lifted yet. I'm essentially telling you what I
can "see" has been made public by having acquired the volume license
already. There's more you'll want to know about the feature sets.

--

William Smith
Technical Analyst
Merrill Communications LLC
(651) 632-1492

[donmontalvo]

The real challenge is going to be, how do you automate import of Microsoft Office 2004/2008 database into 2011?

I'm hoping we can automate, but from what I've seen and heard...ain't gonna be possible. :/ Lemme see....2000 users, each needing to import their old database, possibly more than once since they log on to more than one computer to run Entourage (I know, why not OWA for computers other than your primary?!). I smell lots of Helpdesk calls....

Don

[RobertHammen]

I've snapshotted the betas, as well as the GM. Works fine. Unlike the betas, the volume license stuff doesn't require a software key as far as I can see. There are couple of hidden files, stuff in /Library that it puts relating to licensing. I'm not in the office today, but can screencap the Composer window...
On Sep 24, 2010, at 2:36 AM, Ben.Toms at grey.com wrote:

As was said, moving/migrating from Entourage to Outlook (and, lesser, going from Messenger to Communicator) is more of a documentation/training issue than a technical one (as long as the Exchange 2007 and later back end is in place).

--Robert

[bentoms]

Thanks all for the replies.

I was looking more for something like the Deployment Toolkit.. i.e. plst here is for outlook.. blah blah..

We're having terrible issues with entourage 2008 web services & our exchange server, with most portable & external office customers requiring to empty their caches every other day.. we can't update our exchange server to a newer Service Pack due to change control...

So we're hoping outlook 2011 solves these issues (it does so far...)..

Also we're soon to make the move from 2003 to 2010 on the pc side so the user training should be possible on both platforms.

--missing content--

same as Office 2008. Nothing appears to be different in this regard.

Of interest:

Office 2011 appears to have more investment in .plist preference files,
which offers the hope that using Casper and Managed Preferences (MCX) is
possible.

Outlook *requires* Exchange Server 2007 SP1, roll-up 4 or higher, because
it only supports the Exchange Web Services protocol. WebDAV is not
supported.

Volume license customers are receiving "Communicator" in addition to
"Messenger". Communicator is for OCS 2010. I'm not sure it will work with
anything earlier. For that you can still use Messenger.

Office installs browser plug-ins that are used in conjunction with
Sharepoint.

Although Office has been released to volume license customers, the NDA for
beta testers has not been lifted yet. I'm essentially telling you what I
can "see" has been made public by having acquired the volume license
already. There's more you'll want to know about the feature sets.

--

William Smith
Technical Analyst
Merrill Communications LLC
(651) 632-1492