Not so long ago I had to create a new Office 2003 Administrative Installation Point.

There were 2 choices:

1. Use the default ISO and have WSUS handle patching after each install.
2. Slipstream all available patches in the Office 2003 Administrative Installation Point.

Ofcourse option 2 is the best choice, because then the package will be the most secure from the moment the software is deployed. Also it saves bandwidth and time.

To slipstream updates into Office 2003, there are basically 4 steps:

1. Extract the original Office 2003 files.
2. Download the updates you want to slipstream.
3. Extract the updates you want to slipstream.
4. Slipstream the updates into the extracted Office 2003 files.

You can imagine that the older the source files are, the more updates there are to be slipstreamed. So it is best to use an ISO/CD of Office 2003 with the latest Service Pack.

Still if you have the latest Service Pack, you need to slipstream more than 20 updates. I personally don’t like these kind of manual tasks, so I created this script to do the extraction of the updates for me.

Ofcourse this script can be used to extract other kinds of updates as well..