In this guide, we'll show you how you can slipstream the updates to Office 2003, then show you how to customize your Office 2003 installation.

From the Office Resource Kit site: Only editions of Office 2003 acquired through a Volume License agreement or other non-retail channel allow you to create an administrative installation point. You cannot run Setup.exe in administrative mode ( /a ) with an Office 2003 retail edition. If you cannot make an Administrative Installation Point, you will not be able to slipstream the latest updates into it. However, you can still customize Office 2003's installation by going to Section 3.

First, we'll need to create an Administrative Installation Point so we can be able to slipstream the updates into Office 2003. This only has to be done once, and updates can still be slipstreamed to an existing Administrative Installation Point at a later date.

Insert your Office 2003 CD, and run the following command from the Run box which can be accessed from the Start Menu (Change the CD-ROM drive letter to your Office 2003 CD if it differs from E:\):

This starts Office 2003 Setup, where you can define an Administrative Installation Point for your Office 2003 files.

From here, you can fill in the Organization Name and your Product Key (this is also the last time you will ever need to insert your Office 2003 Product key!).

Set the Install Location to: C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\Applications\Office2003\
(Create the folders beforehand if you haven't done so already)

After clicking on Next, accept the EULA and then the installation will start. Since we executed Setup with the /a switch, its only copying files to the Install Location you specified to create an Administrative Installation Point, not installing Office to the system.

Once finished, click OK as shown above. Your Office 2003 files should all be in the folder specified during setup:

We now need to download the Office 2003 updates that were available at the time of writing, the list is shown in full:

Office 2003 Critical Update (KB828041)
Outlook 2003 Junk E-mail Filter Update (KB832333)
Word 2003 Update (KB830000)

As the above listing may be out of date, you may want to check this page for any updates. The best way to get an up-to-date listing of patches is to install Office 2003, then go to Office Update and take note of all the Knowledge Base Article numbers. Look them up and make sure that you download the "Administrative" Updates, not "Client".

Create a folder in the root of the C:\ drive and name it "O2003updates". Place all the downloaded files into the folder you created:

If you've got WinRAR installed, you can easily extract each file you downloaded. If not, run the following command to extract them in Command Prompt:

FOR %f IN (*.exe) DO %f /Q /C /T:C:\O2003updates

Or, you can download the Extract_Updates.cmd batch which will perform all the extraction commands automatically for you. Place this file in the same folder where the updates reside in (C:\O2003updates\). The batch file will most likely not need to be re-edited when a new Office 2003 update is released, because it processes all *.exe files in the folder.

Once that's done, you should have a couple of *.msp files extracted. You can delete your downloaded *.exe files, or move them to another location for backup purposes. Here's how it should eventually look:

You are now ready to slipstream the updates!

If you want, you can use the Office 2003 Slipstreamer which we've made so you don't have to type out all the necessary commands to slipstream each file. This batch file assumes you have the Office 2003 setup files located at C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\Applications\Office2003\. If it differs, please do not use the Office 2003 Slipstreamer. However, it is up to you to edit the batch file in Notepad to make the necessary changes.

Download: Office 2003 Slipstreamer. All you have to do is execute the batch file from C:\O2003updates\ and leave it to do the rest!

For those who wish to manually slipstream the updates, below are the following commands you should run from Command Prompt:

cd C:\O2003updates FOR %f IN (*.msp) DO msiexec /p %f /a C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\applications\Office2003\pro11.msi SHORTFILENAMES=TRUE /qb

After that's all done, you have a fully up-to-date Office 2003 distribution. At this stage you can choose to burn the contents of C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\Applications\Office2003 to a CD-R and keep it in storage if you need it in future.

You will also be able to slipstream another update if one becomes available using the instructions we've showed you in this guide without making another Administrative Installation Point because it only needs to be done once.

Note: If you were brought here from the link at the top of the page, please copy the contents of your Office 2003 disc to: C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\Applications\Office2003\ now. (make sure you enable showing of Hidden files and folders via Folder Options so the CAB files are copied as well)

Download: Office 2003 Resource Kit Tools

Execute ork.exe to install the Office 2003 Resource Kit Tools. Go to Start > Programs > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit Tools and select Custom Installation Wizard.

You'll be presented with the first screen of 22 to go through. It won't take too long to go through, because most of these options can be skipped:

In step 2, choose the MSI file in your Office2003 folder. That would be PROPLUS.msi for Office2003 Professional with Frontpage (and PRO.msi without Frontpage)

Step 3: Create a new MST file

Step 4: Name it Unattended.MST in C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\Applications\Office2003\

Step 5: Leave Alone, unless you want to specify a different destination directory to install Office 2003 into.

Go through the rest of the steps to customize your Office 2003 installation, and skip sections that you don't understand.

At the end, you are shown your command line to run:

This command will perform a silent installation of Office 2003 using the Unattended.MST file you created in the Custom Installation Wizard to set your customized options. But we don't want to use the exact command shown above as this wouldn't exist when installing from a CD, so we will need to change this when we add it to a batch file:

TRANSFORMS=C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\install\Applications\Office2003\Unattended.MST /qb-
changed to...
TRANSFORMS=Unattended.MST /qb-

As you read at the end of Section 3, we needed to change the path in the TRANSFORM syntax in order for it to work. Below are the full batch commands you can use, so add these lines to your batch file:

ECHO.
ECHO Installing Office 2003 Professional with Frontpage
ECHO Please wait...
start /wait %systemdrive%\install\Applications\Office2003\setup.exe TRANSFORMS=Unattended.MST /qb-

That's it!