Hello, I'm posting a draft copy of this article in order to receive your feedback before the article is published in the Office 2010 Beta Resource Kit on Microsoft TechNet, located here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303401(office.14).aspx.
I would greatly appreciate your input. For example, is the information adequate? Do you like the layout? What improvements would you suggest? Thank-you for taking the time to read this article and (hopefully) provide feedback.
Here are the links to download the Office 2010 Beta and System Center Essentials 2010 Beta:
Here is the article:
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In this article:
This article provides detailed technical guidance on the processes and procedures when using System Center Essentials 2010 to deploy the 2010 Microsoft Office system in a medium sized organization.
Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 is an IT management solution designed for system administrators in medium-sized organizations with up to 50 servers and 500 clients. Using a unified console, IT system administrators can easily secure, update, monitor, and track their entire IT environment. This article provides detailed technical guidance for specifically deploying the 2010 Office system.
Although this article illustrates the test network environment used for helping to describe the process of deploying the 2010 Office system by using Essentials 2010, it does not provide information about how to set up the test network infrastructure, such as the Active Directory directory service, Microsoft SQL Server, and Essentials 2010. However, it does provide links for setting up a similar network infrastructure. This information is located in the last section of this article, Resources for deploying the infrastructure.
The target audience for this article is IT professionals. These IT professionals could include network managers, consultants, and IT managers who work for or with medium organizations.
Prior knowledge and experience will help users understand and apply the information in this article, particularly experience in the following areas:
This section provides a description of the test network environment for the Essentials 2010 infrastructure. It also includes procedural information of the steps for deploying Microsoft Office Professional 2010 by using Essentials 2010.
The test network environment for this article is described as follows:
All of the servers (A and B) are running Windows Server 2008 R2 and are members of the same domain (CPANDL.COM), including the client computers (C), which are running Windows 7 Professional. The applications and roles that each server is running, and the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) for each client computer, are listed as follows:
In this example deployment scenario, detailed information is provided for deploying Office Professional 2010 in the previously defined Essentials 2010 test environment. By following these steps, you can use Essentials 2010 to deploy a silent installation of the 2010 Office system, where the users do not interact with the installation process. In this example, the first step is to create a customization file for the silent installation of the 2007 Office system.
The application file to create a setup customization file for the 2010 Office system is run from the source directory containing a copy of all the files from your Office CD. In this example the source files were copied to \\SCE\Office2010\Professional.
In Office 2010 (as in the 2007 Microsoft Office system), Setup controls the complete installation. This includes processes that Windows Installer handled in Office versions earlier than the 2007 Office system. Customizing the default behavior of Setup allows you to control the process. In this example, you customize the installation for a silent installation of Office 2010.
The Office Customization Tool (OCT) is used to create a Setup customization file (MSP file). Setup applies this file when Office is installed on the computers.
The next step, using Essentials 2010, is to create a computer group containing the computers on which Office 2010 will be installed.
To create a new computer group containing individually selected computers
The next step is to create a new software deployment package of Office 2010 and then select the previously created group, Office 2010, for the computers on which Office 2010 will be installed.
To create a software package
The approved package will then be deployed to the computers within the selected computer group based on the configured settings for the package and how Automatic Updates is configured on the managed computers. In this example, because there was not a specific deadline set for the software package, the package was not configured as optional, and Automatic Updates is enabled on the managed computers the software package for Office 2010 installation began at the specified time for Automatic Updates to be installed, which defaults to a daily basis at 3:00am. For more information see About Software Deployment in System Center Essentials (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb422798.aspx).
In the Software Packages pane select the software package, which in this example is Office2010Pro, to monitor the status. Upon completion of installing Office 2010 the status will be listed as Successful.
This section includes resources to help you understand and configure an infrastructure to test the deployment of the 2010 Office system by using Essentials 2010.
Windows 7 Resources on Microsoft TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd361745.aspx?ITPID=mscomsc)