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A standard install is all very well but you reach a point, at least at the home user/small business level, where standardization falls down. Not every computer is going to have the same version of MS Office installed (or even have Office), some computers will not already have Acrobat Reader (or have an older version pre-installed).
Having already dealt with service packs, Windows/Microsoft Updates and standard utilities, now it’s time to come up with a good way of handling these extra items. I’ve set this up with our typical customers in mind and it handles the stuff we usually need. Obviously once you get to this level there is almost infinite scope for how you might handle things.
For me, the main areas that I need are:
- Extra bits that support Microsoft Office 2003 versions
- Extra bits that support Microsoft Office 2007 versions
- Extra bits that might be needed on an ad hoc basis
A large percentage of the computers we handle here have MS Office installed so I’ve gone to the trouble of scripting the installation of the bits for these. The more ad hoc extras, though, I’ve approached from the perspective of just knowing they’re handy when I need them and then manually installing as required. We don’t often need these (maybe once every 20-30 times we use this build process) but when we do it’s much easier to have them at hand instead of having to download or find from some other install media.
Having dealt with this bit of background, the next three articles on this topic will go into more specifics on what I actually install and why.
