Hi, I'm not sure how other companies do this. I'm the network admin at a school. I'm having tons of issues with Office asking for the install media on sporatic PCs. All I need to do is point it to the install location on the network. But when I worked at a previous company, they kept all their software on a share. But then later switched to Altiris and didn't have this issue anymore. Otherwise they needed to keep their software on a share so they could point the clients to it when it needed to access the media. But you always run the risk of users just downloading the Microsoft media from the share because now anyone can access it. So, now I took the Office share off the school network and I have tons of PCs that are asking for the media when starting the software. I don't want to leave the media out on the network. So one way I've been getting around it is I've been copying the CD contents to the hard drive and installing from the hard drive. I have group policies in place so users cannot access the hard drive directly, but this seems way too overboard. There has to be a better way.

Have you considered calling Microsoft, assuming you are using valid licenses for your products? Before I started figuring out how to treat the symptom (Office asking for the install media) I'd try to find out the root cause of the problem. I don't think the application should be sporadically asking for the media and perhaps MS can help you solve that issue. From there you can discuss the optimal configuration for your network.

We have valid licenses. But Microsoft charges for their support. We just had a security issue with AD and called Microsoft. Cost us $249 for one call. I don't want to pay that for this one issue.

Think about the hidden costs. What's it going to cost in time and effort, not just now, but in the future, to continue to use a method that even you deemed as "way too overboard"? Sometimes it costs less to pay for the proper solution upfront than to keep fighting the problem on an ongoing basis. If the workaround costs more than the fix, why use the workaround? Obviously, if you can get a free answer, that's best and I wish you luck with that. If you don't get an answer in this forum, you could try the Networking forum. http://www.computing.net/forum/netw... or the forum for your Server - look under the General Forums tab for the various server related forums. Good luck!