Does it make any sense to perform network installations for office applications any more? I remember back in the DOS days, when hard drive space was at a premium and control of the environment was a must (who remembers having to set 50 DOS environment variables to make one application work? 🙂 ), it made sense to keep everything in one cental location, but nowadays, it just doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore. Many applications (the big three in Office apps in particular: Corel, Microsoft and Lotus) still yet offer a network installation option, keeping only the user customizable portion of the app on the hard drive. Question is, with workstation hard drives fast approaching 20 GB for an entry level machine, and with the prolific use of system management software, such as Microsoft’s SMS and ZENworks, to roll out any patches or updates, is there really any advantage to performing a network installation for any application? Any thoughts?
