Profile Wizard

How to Distribute a Standard Office User Profile in a Staged Deployment

In a staged deployment, some Microsoft Office 2000 applications are deployed in the initial stage, and the rest are deployed later. There are two general methods for handling a staged deployment, each yielding different results. You can take advantage of user profiles in either case.

Deploy the full set of user settings at each stage

In this scenario, you set up a test computer with all of the Office 2000 components, and create an Office profile settings (OPS) file based on all of the applications. You stage the deployment as follows:

Stage 1   Deploy the first set of applications (for example, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft PowerPoint) with the full set of user profile settings.

Stage 2   Deploy the second set of applications (for example, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer) and repeat the full set of user profile settings.

This scenario represents the simplest way to stage a deployment and distribute default user settings. However, if users customize any of their Office settings between Stage 1 and Stage 2, they might lose those customizations during Stage 2.

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Customize the Profile Wizard for a staged deployment

In this scenario, you customize the Profile Wizard to capture only the settings relevant to the set of applications that are installed in each stage. You stage the deployment as follows:

Stage 1   Create an OPS file based on only the Office 2000 applications scheduled for the first round of deployment, and then deploy Stage 1 applications.

Stage 2   Customize settings for the second round of Office 2000 applications, create a second OPS file, and then deploy Stage 2 applications.

This scenario ensures that both the default settings and any customizations made by the user are preserved. However, the administrator must invest time determining which settings to add at Stage 2 and then customizing the Profile Wizard to track only those settings.