Office Deployment and OSDUpdate
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The first good use for OSDUpdate has been to patch an Office installation source with the latest updates. This method has been a common practice since CollectUpdates.vbs was introduced ages ago
While this method is the "Best Practice", it is not the fastest method of Office 2016 deployment. All testing in this Guide was in a clean Windows 10 Virtual Machine (2 Cores, 8GB RAM) with all content local in the VM. All times were recorded using PowerShell Measure-Command
If you aren't interested in a faster way to install Office, get back to Twitter ASAP
23 minutes 39 seconds (includes 58 Updates)
In this test, the Office Updates directory was fully patched with the latest updates using OSDUpdate. This is the method used by most everybody when deploying Office
5 minutes 31 seconds (includes 0 Updates)
This may come as a total shock, but removing all updates from the Office Updates directory results in a deployment time that is 18 minutes faster. Unfortunately this results in a system that must get Updates from SCCM or WSUS, which will undoubtedly take longer than 18 minutes
This method has not been released yet, Stay tuned
Instead of using SCCM or WSUS to update Office after an Office deployment sans Updates, running the updates in a Post Install process will be considerably quicker. This method involves installing the MSP Updates using the following command line in a foreach loop
And here's the results
14 minutes and 28 seconds (includes 58 Updates)
If you are mathematically challenged, here's a picture to explain this conclusion. Installing the updates as a Office Post Install is 3 minutes and 47 seconds (18%) faster than including the updates in the Office Updates directory.
Office 2016 alone is about 825MB, with the 58 updates consuming 1.02GB. Having these two combined results in a 1.83GB Package that changes monthly.
Separating Office from the Updates will allow the 825MB Office 2016 32-Bit package to remain static, never needing updates (which helps with replication), while the Updates Package will be the one that changes. Food for thought
I've been deploying Windows and Office Updates using this method in a large Enterprise for the last 4 years, without any issues
