How do I create an administrative installation of Microsoft Office 2007?

A. As with earlier versions of Office, an administrative mode is available with Office 2007. To perform an administrative installation use the "setup /admin" switch, which opens the Office Customization tool that the figure shows. If you receive an error that components are missing, check that you have the admin folder at the root of your media. Some versions don't have this folder so administrative setup isn't possible.

Once you've made your desired customization changes, save the setup file to a Windows Installer Patch (.msp) file. You then pass it to setup.exe by using this command:

    
setup.exe /adminfile off2007admin.msp.  

Because of the reliance on setup.exe, you can't deploy Office 2007 via Group Policy unless you wrap it in a .zap file; however deployment via Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) is supported and documented here.