The hairline shows how long I've been in IT
If you are preparing your first Office patches, you may have a hard time finding them in the Distribute Software Updates Wizard. Office patches are set up a little differently than OS patches. How differently depends on whether you are using ITMU or the SUSFP Office scanner. In each case, the main problem is that the patch for each affected product has it's own Q number. These are listed in the bulletin web page, but I prefer to identify them through SMS. That's especially valuable for updates such as XML that may have both OS and Office components affected.
ITMUThe SMS console's Software Updates section has all updates and can be sorted by any of the columns. In ITMU, Office patches have the Q and bulletin numbers in the respective columns. Click the heading of the Bulletin number column to sort by that data, then locate the current updates. You'll find all of the product patches together. I like to export this list to an Excel spreadsheet and sort there, then delete all rows I'm not concerned with for that deployment. That makes it easiest to make sure I locate and select all of the proper patches in DSUW.
The individual patches can be located in DSUW the same as for OS updates, by entering the Q number as the appropriate filter.
SUSFP Office ScannerIf you are using the older Office scanner, either because you haven't upgraded to ITMU or because you still have some computers with Office 2000, it's trickier. The Office patches are listed in the SMS console's Software Updates section without any data in the Q or bulletin number columns. The first step is to export the Software Updates data to a spreadsheet. Then use Find to search for each of the Q numbers listed in the bulletin web page and move all matching rows to a separate sheet. Watch carefully for Q numbers that appear on more than one line, and move each of them.
These patches are located in DSUW by entering the Q number as the filter for the Name field. Make sure you locate and select all of the appropriate patches for all products in your environment.
GeneralAs you search for these updates in the spreadsheets or console Software Updates, make certain you identify all patches you need to deploy. In some cases they will be listed under different scanners. They might have updates for OS components, Office products supported by ITMU, and Office products that are not supported by ITMU. Be sure to make a complete list of the patches to be selected in DSUW. Always be on the lookout for variations and exceptions. Check the counts reported in Software Updates after your scanners have run on most machines and the results reported through hardware inventory. Be prepared for surprises.
I have also seen that computers with a mix of Office versions installed, such as Office XP with a different version or SP level of Front Page, Access or Power Point can mess up the scanners. That seems especially true of products from the same version but different service pack levels. That can easily happen if Office products that may be installed separately, such as Front Page, are not carefully kept at the latest service pack level, including updating the installation packages. Baseline patching can help with this, especially if it includes the proper Office service packs.
For even more headaches while patching Office (or any other app) is trying to patch an install that was done in a manner that did not make use of resilient sources (when that install uses Windows Installer). You can sometimes get away with using the fullfile patch, but that's iffy at best.
Personally, I haven't had any problems with the fullfile patches, only with the others. ITMU defaults to fullfile. The Office scanner seems to default to it now, but didn't before the beginning of 2007.