[Casper] Office 2004 Update

[Smith, William]

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


On 2/5/07 5:30 PM, "Vahhaji, Cyrus" <Cyrus.Vahhaji at bestbuy.com> wrote:

> Wanted to see how most Casper users run Office updates in their environment.
> Need to run the latest Office update. Up to now I¹ve been running the update
> on one machine and use ARD to push ŒMicrosoft Office 2004¹ folder with the
> update to machines that don¹t have it.
> 
> Any suggestions is appreciated,
> 
> BTW, we are still on Panther and using PPC Macs.
> 
> Thanx in advance,
> Cyrus
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Casper at list.jamfsoftware.com
> http://list.jamfsoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/casper

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