Office Administrative Installs

• Directly from CD or CD image - you run setup.exe (or the MSI) from the CD image, pick your options and install on a single computer. When you use this method, you must supply the Office PID each time you install. Updates to Office using this approach are manual (the user can navigate to the Office Update site and select patches to install), or can be handled by WSUS.
  
• An Adminstrative install - you run setup using the /A switch, which loads all of Office onto a server share. From this server share, users can run setup to install Office on their individual systems. When you use this approach, you supply the PID when running Setup /a. Users can then install directly from the server share, without having to specify the PID. Patching in this environemtn is more difficult - see below.
  
• Using Locall Installation Source - this is a new method, added with Office 2003. With this option. you copy the CD image (which is highly compressed), to a serve share. Users can just run setup to install Office, which is in effect the same as the first option. However, you can modify the setup.ini files, to specify a Installer Transform, whihc can customisethe specify options added. Patching this type of install is the same as for dicect installs, ie manually or vua WSUS.
  

Patching Administrative Installs of Office via WSUS

• A full file (FF) *.MSP (MS Installer patch) - in this option,whole files are contained in the MSP and are replaced on the users file system.
• A delta patch - this is an .MSP file that represents simply a change from the original file. The delta patch is therefore much smaller.

By moving to delta patching, Microsoft can significantly reduce the size of the patch, thus making patching much quicker. However, in order to use delta patching, the update tool must have access to the original source file. This is why the LIS option is now the preferred option.

With delta patching:

• The delta is download and the install is attempted.
• If this fails because the needed baseline isn't installed it will attempt to use the source if available.
• If the source isn't present, such as a CD not in the drive or a UNC
  path thats not availalbe, or the source is of the wrong baseline AU will
  fail with a special error code.
• When AU fails with this special error code the next time it attempts
  to provide this update it will use the FF *.MSP file which won't fail for
  this reason, it doesn't need a baseline to successfully install.

Office Update and WSUS support