We’re going to start moving from MSI to C2R and I wanted to see what other folks are doing in their environment. Since you have to uninstall all MSI Office prior, we’ll plan to have a baseline that uninstalls any prior MSI Office installs (big thanks to William Easton and hist C3 Patch fixlets!!!) and then installs C2R Office via ODT. We plan to manage the installs and updates via BigFix (not GPO), such as disabling auto updates and controlling when a newer channel is to be deployed.
Things that I’m thinking about are:
Deployment - I really don’t want to use a network share, so that leaves using the BigFix infrastructure or CDN. I love the idea of using CDN and simply deploying the latest ODT setup.exe and the .xml file and letting the download happen via CDN. Is that realistic? Otherwise I would have to go with local which means having a big file to deploy; not necessarily a major issue however.
If I go with local, I gather I would have to use the ODT to cache the install to a local folder and then upload those contents into my fixlet? The command in the fixlet would then use this local path for its source?
What about when later a user needs Visio or Project. My hope with CDN would make this easy. But if I have to use local, I have to have separate packages. We do this today with MSI so perhaps I’m making this more difficult than it should be.
Anyway, I would love to hear what others are doing. My reason for not using a network share is that we are a global company and I don’t want to rely on endpoints being connected to the local network or reliant on Active Directory.