Automatic update of Office using COM interfaces

[Dorel Sturm]

Hi there,

I'm using the Windows Update Agent API COM interfaces
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wua_sdk/wua/portal_client.asp)
to update the Windows system and MS Office products. Everything works OK
until recently Microsoft moved the Office updates to
officeupdate.microsoft.com WEB site. Using plain Windows Agent APIs (COM
interfaces) from Windows Update Agent 2.0 we can see only the available
updates from windowsupdate.microsoft.com, those from
officeupdate.microsoft.com are not visible.

A way to get also the office updates too is to visit the
update.microsoft.com WEB site and manually install the ActiveX control.
After this ActiveX control is installed, the office updates are also visible
using Windows Update Agent 2.0 APIs (COM interfaces).

My question is how we can in a LAN deploy this ActiveX control on all
computers (asking all the users to log as administrator and visit that
update.microsoft.com WEB site is not a valid solution)?

Note that this ActiveX control does not update the Windows Update Agent COM
interfaces and type library.


Thanks for your help.