Catherine,
This is a really good thing to ask.
There is a very simple way to do this: install the Office Resource Kit and
make sure that the correct .adm files are available to you. Then, once you
go to the GPO you can simply right click on the Administrative Templates and
select Add/Remove Templates and then simply add the Office9.adm, Word9.adm,
PPoint9.adm, Outlk9.adm, Excel9.adm and Access9.adm files ( this is assuming
Office 2000, as that would be the 'equivalent's to 'Office 9'. Office XP
would be Office 10, for example ). Once this is done you would simply enter
the default path that you want in Tools | Options and then in the General
section. You would need to enable the 'Default File Location' and then give
the path.
Now, how do you do this exactly? That depends on you. There are two ways
that I can think of right now. One is not what I would necessarily do and
the other is what I would do.
So, the one that I would not necessarily do:
Install the Office Resource Kit on the Domain Controller on which you create
the GPOs ( generally the one that holds the FSMO Role of PDC Emulator ).
Then, go to the ADUC and go to the OU in question ( assuming that you are
doing this at the OU level....there are two others - Site and Domain. I am
leaving the Local level out of this conversation for obvious reasons ) and
create the GPO. You would then go to the Admin Templates, right click and
select Add/Remove templates. Then you simply add the .adm files that I
mentioned above. You need to know that they are located in the hidden inf
folder that is located in the WINNT folder. So, you will need to make sure
that you have enabled 'Show all hidden files and folders'.
Then, you will notice that you have a lot more templates - Office 2000, Word
2000, Excel 2000, PowerPoint 2000, et al. Go to the Tools | Options
sub-folder of each one and then to the General folder and in the right pane
you will see the 'Default File Location' entry. Simply enable it and enter
the path that you want ( probably to the redirected My Documents
folder???? ). I am not sure if you can do this in the Office 2000 templates
area. I would guess that you could and it would affect at the least Word
and Excel. I have never tried that....maybe I will look into this in a test
lab later!
Now, for the way that I would do it:
On a Windows 2000 workstation make sure that you install the ADMINPAK (
located on the Service Pack CD ) so that you will have all of the ADUC MMCs
available to you ( assuming that you are logging on as a member of the
Domain Admins....probably should not normally but for these purposes it is
okay! ). You would then install the Office Resource Kit on your 'admin'
workstation. Then simply go to the Administrative Tools and open up the
ADUC and create the GPO normally. You will have to add the .adm templates -
just like above - for them to be available to you. Please note that you
might want to copy the .adm files to a shared network folder and use that
location as the source instead of your local c:\winnt\inf folder.....
HTH,
Cary
