Office XP CD and Administrative Installation Source Issues

  • Article

The type of Windows Installer source used for an Office XP installation depends on how you install Office XP. When Office XP is installed using Setup from the CD or a network share, it uses the Windows Installer compressed source. When Office XP is installed from an administrative installation point created by running setup /a, it uses an uncompressed source.

The Office Windows Installer source types from these two types of sources are not compatible with each other. As a result, if you use a different source type after installation, your installation either fails or Office XP is uninstalled and then reinstalled from the new source type. This problem typically occurs when Office XP has been installed directly from an Office XP CD, but then an update to the Office XP installation is distributed that references an administrative installation point source. This issue is fixed with Windows Installer version 2.0.

You can avoid this incompatible source problem by enforcing the use of one type of Office XP source in the enterprise. For example, if an administrative installation of Office XP is being used within an environment managed by SMS, then give users CDs of the image that they can install manually. For more information, see the Office deployment section in the Microsoft Office Resource Kit. Users should then be discouraged from using retail versions of Office XP installations. In addition, computers with the retail version of Office XP (for example, vendor or non-corporate owned computers) should not be deployed in the SMS hierarchy.

It is technically possible to maintain both a standard non-compressed and an administrative compressed version of Office XP on the SMS distribution points, and then direct clients to the appropriate source based on the installed Office source type. However, this is difficult to enforce reliably and is beyond the scope of this appendix. A better approach is to periodically distribute a command for the client to synchronize the installed Office XP source with that on the installation point. This procedure is the same as that described for synchronizing following the updating of the installation point source with a Windows Installer update:

  1. Create a program for each site called Office Synchronization Program.

  2. Add the command line:

    3. 



setup.exe /fvm



    

  1. For setup command-line options, see https://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/appndx/setopt.htm.
    

    2. 

  2. Create an advertisement for each site to advertise this program.
    

    3. 



For More Information


Did you find this information useful? Please send your suggestions and comments about the documentation to smsdocs@microsoft.com.