Office 2003 Resource Kit Documentation


The information in the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit has been updated to cover the latest changes in tools, deployment strategies, and administration techniques. You’ll find broad coverage of new features, such as the many enhancements to Microsoft Office Outlook 2003, along with details on the more subtle changes that can affect your customizations. The information on security has been expanded to describe how you can help improve the reliability and protection of your systems, while the new Appendix B, “Office 2003 Resource Kit Reference” gives you quick access to information on settings, properties, and options.

A key part of the Office Resource Kit is the ongoing support provided on the Office Resource Kit Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2003. The Web site includes all of the information provided with the book, plus articles on software updates, deployment and support strategies, and emerging issues. Current versions of all tools and support files are provided in the Office Resource Kit Toolbox on the Web site, along with administrative update files for current and past versions of Office products.

If you’ve used previous versions of the Office Resource Kit, you’ll find that the latest edition follows a familiar format, while calling out the new features and techniques for your attention. Documentation for the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit is organized into seven parts and two appendixes.

Part 1: Getting Started

Getting Started summarizes the tools, documentation, and other resources provided with the Office 2003 Resource Kit. You’ll find tips on installing the Office Resource Kit, along with tables listing the tools and supplemental information. The section on documentation highlights some of the major changes in deployment, messaging, and other key areas of the product. Information about system requirements for the Office 2003 System is included, as well as addresses of articles on Microsoft licensing programs.

Security is a major theme in the Office 2003 Resource Kit, and you’ll find new chapters that summarize the technical information and strategies designed to help you manage the security of your Office 2003 System. A final section catalogs other resources on the Microsoft Web site for administrators and information technology (IT) professionals who support Microsoft Office in their organizations.

Part 2: Deployment

The deployment chapters provide the core information you need to get Office 2003 up and running across your organization. This part includes broad coverage of the updated deployment tools, along with information about platform issues, customization, and distribution. You’ll find tips and strategies for deploying Office in small or medium-sized organizations, as well as expanded information about Microsoft Windows technologies such as Group Policy.

New to the Office 2003 Resource Kit is the option to deploy from a copy of the compressed Office CD image and take advantage of a local installation source. When you install from a compressed CD image on the network, Setup automatically creates a cache of installation files on the local computer. The local cache provides improved resiliency for users to repair, reinstall, or update Office after the initial deployment. Full support and information is still provided for creating an uncompressed administrative installation point using the /a option.

After you create an installation source on the network (either an administrative installation point or a compressed image of the Office 2003 CD), you can make extensive customizations before you install Office on users’ computers. The deployment chapters guide you through the customization process, and show you how you can control many aspects of the installation process itself, including how much users interact with Setup and whether Setup creates a local cache of installation files.

Part 3: Messaging

Microsoft Outlook has been extensively redesigned for Office 2003, and the Office Resource Kit provides information to help you configure and take advantage of the new features. The following list summarizes some of the key enhancements:

  • Cached Exchange Mode is a new option that configures Outlook to use a local copy of users’ mailboxes, allowing users more reliable access to their Outlook data whether they are connected to a network or working offline.

  • A new Junk E-mail Filter replaces the rules used in previous versions of Outlook to filter mail. Messages that are caught by the filter are moved to the Junk E-mail folder where they can be viewed or deleted later.

  • Outlook 2003 supports cryptographic features—such as digital signing and message encryption—to help provide security-enhanced e-mail messaging over the Internet or local intranet. You can customize features in your Outlook 2003 deployment to set cryptographic options appropriate for your organization.

  • Information Rights Management (IRM), another new feature, helps users prevent sensitive e-mail messages and other Office 2003 content, such as documents and worksheets, from being forwarded, edited, or copied and pasted by unauthorized people.

  • In Outlook 2003, Unicode support has been expanded throughout the product. You can specify several options for managing how users experience Unicode in Outlook 2003, including specifying the format of automatically created PST files in Outlook.

  • Through the use of a new feature called RPC over HTTP, you can configure user accounts in Outlook 2003 to connect to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 over the Internet without the need to use virtual private network (VPN) connections.

Part 4: Worldwide Deployment

Microsoft Office 2003 provides tools that simplify deploying and supporting Office across language boundaries—including the Microsoft Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface (MUI) Pack, which gives organizations the option to configure the Office user interface in multiple languages. Deploying Microsoft Office 2003 with the MUI Pack is typically a straightforward process. You can easily include one or more MUI Packs with your Office deployment by using several methods, including chaining packages to the installation.

Outlook 2003 supports Unicode and provides full support for multilingual data. If you work in a multinational organization or share messages and items with people who use Outlook on systems that run in other languages, you can take advantage of Unicode to work with messages and items that are composed in different languages.

There are a variety of ways to deploy Microsoft Office 2003 in a multilingual environment. The Office Resource Kit describes several deployment scenarios, with step-by-step examples of how to customize and install Office in those situations. If your organization’s deployment needs do not follow one of these examples exactly, you can often adapt the examples to customize your own multilingual deployment.

Part 5: Maintenance

After Microsoft Office 2003 has been deployed, you can modify users’ configurations, lock down a particular configuration, or deploy service releases and product updates. The Office Resource Kit guides you through these processes by describing how to use the Custom Maintenance Wizard and other tools provided in the Office 2003 Resource Kit, as well as tools such as Group Policy provided with the Microsoft Windows operating system.

In a Microsoft Windows-based network, Group Policy settings help administrators control how users work with Microsoft Office 2003. Chapters in the Maintenance part explain how you can set policies to define and maintain a particular Office 2003 configuration on users’ computers.

Other maintenance tasks discussed in the Office Resource Kit include using the automatic and manual Detect and Repair feature, managing crash reports with Windows Corporate Error Reporting, and distributing Office 2003 product updates.

Part 6: Collaboration Resources

Key among new collaboration resources is Information Rights Management (IRM), a feature of Microsoft Office 2003 designed to enhance collaboration methods and help restrict unauthorized access to the content of Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, and Outlook 2003 files. IRM uses encryption, permissions, licenses, Microsoft Active Directory directory service, license revocation, and Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services for Windows Server 2003 (RMS) or Passport to help provide a rights-managed method of content collaboration among a well-defined and carefully managed group of individuals.

Also included in the Collaboration part is a summary of Microsoft Windows SharePoint™ Services 2.0, which can be used with Office 2003 to help users work together and share information. SharePoint sites provide a central repository for documents, information, and ideas, and they allow users to work interactively with these items and with each other.

Additional information about collaboration and Web services for Office 2003 is available on the Office Resource Kit Web site.

Part 7: Security

Security has been a major focus in the development of Office 2003, and this part addresses many of the security issues an administrator should consider when deploying or maintaining an Office configuration in an organization. You’ll find information on security strategy planning and suggested ways you can help to limit exposure to attacks. Guidance is also provided on how to help manage the security of a deployed installation through security-related policies.

Examples and scenarios are designed to help you avoid many of the administrative and user-level security vulnerabilities that can be exposed by improper configuration of settings and user methods. A section on macro security provides a summary of many of the vulnerabilities that can be exposed by custom solutions your users may create to work with the Office 2003 System.

Appendixes

The Office 2003 Resource Kit tools have been updated to help you customize, configure, and deploy the Office 2003 System within your organization. With the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit companion CD, you can install the core tools and support documents through one integrated Setup program. The tools are also available for download from the Toolbox on the Office 2003 Resource Kit Web site.

Appendix B, “Office 2003 Resource Kit Reference” provides detailed information about the mechanics of the installation and maintenance processes. You can use Appendix B to look up definitions for Setup command-line options, properties, and settings. Appendix B also provides information about text files and tools used both during and after installation.

Documentation conventions in the Office Resource Kit

The following terms and text formats are used in the Office Resource Kit.

Convention

Meaning

Bold

Indicates the actual properties, commands, words, or characters that you type, view, or click in the user interface.

Italic

In procedures, command lines, or syntax, italic characters indicate a placeholder for information or parameters that you must provide. For example, if the procedure asks you to type a file name, you type the actual name of a file.

Path\File name

Indicates a Windows file system path or registry key—for example, the file Templates\Normal.dot. Unless otherwise indicated, you can use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters when you type paths and file names.

Monospace

Represents examples of code text.




Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit 2003
Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit (Pro-Resource Kit)
ISBN: 0735618801
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 196

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