Microsoft Office 2003 Migration

Last week was my Exchange Server 2003 migration. This week has been my Office 2003 migration week. Using VMware workstation I created to two workstations, one with the current Office installation we have, another without any office installation. Then I did an administrative installation of MS Office 2003 to a network share. Next I downloaded the Office 2003 resource kit (free) from Microsoft. Using the Custom Installation Wizard I created a transform (MST) file to automate the installation and settings for our environment. Next I created a Group Policy Object (GPO) on our network and assigned it to a test OU I created in my Active Directory (AD) and had placed the two XP workstations in. After both booted up, the Office installation started (I assign the installation to the machine rather then the user) and completed in about 5 minutes or less. The workstation without any Office was perfect. When I opened Outlook it was pre-configured for the user and took them right to their inbox, sweet. The second workstation I worried about. A few of our users have MS Office 2000 Professional, which has Access and we are migrating to MS Office 2003 Standard which doesn't. My worries seem to be un-founded though as it left Access 2000 but removed the rest of the suite, which is what I wanted. After doing this test "lab" deployment, I then assigned the GPO to two IS users, both of which had no problems. After testing that for a day I expanded the assigned GPO to 8 more users on our network. I gave these users two days to test the installation. Of the 8, or total of 11 now that were using it (myself included) we had three problems reported. The first was a problem accessing a shared public folder calendar. Rebooting the user’s workstation resolved this issue. Next, a user reported that they could not set the Word ruler to inches, only picas. Changing the setting in Tools --> Options --> General did nothing. We ended up deleting the registry preference key for Word (method 2 found here) and starting Word again, which resolved the issue. The last issue was the strangest one. The user opened a Word document that had a graphic inserted into the document and the graphic was exactly backwards, like in a mirror. If I opened the document in Word 2000 though it was just fine, the correct orientation. I had the user modify the document in Photoshop and re-insert the picture (about 6 files were this way), really weird. So with minimal problems, this afternoon I deployed the Office 2003 installation to everyone to happen when they reboot their computers before they go home. If the testing phase is any indicator, tomorrow should go smooth.