Hi,
We've recently reviewed our position statement on Office applications, and part of this is to give schools the option of using OpenOffice in the Curriculum rather than Microsoft Office. We're now in the process of creating an msi to deploy OO via GPO. This potentially could end up in 400+ schools, so I'm keen to learn if other people have deployed OO via an msi, and if so:
- what pitfalls have you come across?
- what lessons learned could you share?
- have you used a different method of deployment?
- Is anyone aware of an open source alternative to SCCM?
Thanks in advance. 
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We have made OO part of our base deployment. Can I recommend using the appdeploy site guidelines for OO http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=1381 They are a very reliable source of information for packaging.
We did not replace Office 2003, as we have already paid for the licenses.We have both OO and Office 2003. Pupils are advised to install OO on their machines at home, if they do not have office. The learners are fine switching between OO and MS Office.
There is no equivalent of Publisher in OO. I would love to remove publisher from our system! Why do some teachers love Publisher so much! i am trying to ween staff over to Inkscape and free version of Page Plus.
As for a SCCM alternative. We use GPO, Hyper V2 manager and WSUS as a free alternatives. I know of one open source tool for deploying packages see http://wpkg.org/. In terms of inventory management we use OCS/GLPI to monitor systems state etc.
Tim
That's really useful, thanks. Not sure how much Publisher is used in our schools on the Curriculum side, so probably need to ask the question.
I'm going to take a look at wpkg.org - looks interesting!! We're also about to start implemeting a central WSUS server - not sure how much this is going to batter the bandwidth initially as we have a lot of updates to do, but we're starting with a small pilot so fingers crossed.
Thanks again for the pointers.
Thanks for the pointers. Interested in wpkg - having a go at installing it now on a virtual test system!!