Installation is something that the average user doesn’t have to spend too much time thinking about. They pop in the cd/dvd, go through a few screens (most often just clicking the continue button without making any changes) and more often than not things go pretty smoothly. However, for IT admins, installation can be a very different beast.

As part of our investigation for each new version of Office for Mac, we talk to our “Customer Council� which is made-up of different groups of Office for Mac users, including IT admins. Over the years, when we have asked about their experiences with the deployment of Office, the feedback has been that the current system works, but it would be nice if we would streamline things by moving to a .pkg format.

After talking about the issue in more depth, we discovered that in previous versions of Office for Mac, IT admins have needed to do all sorts of complex steps to get builds deployed out to their users. In fact, it was common for an IT admin to extract the bits from the installation cd, move things around, alter plist files, and more. Then they would roll it all back up into a .pkg format file before deploying it out to remote machines. Frankly, this is a lot of hoops to jump through and we want make the experience better.

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Microsoft, Office 2008, Office 2008 Enterprise Series, Deployment