The beauty of the Microsoft Office family of products is their ease of use. There is no doubt that this is why it sells so well. If it works, it tends to work well, however if it doesnt, it tends to be the biggest pain in the ass you are likely to experience.

I will document some of what it took to install MSOffice 95 in a network server type of installtion, with all the clients doing a "run from server" type of installation. Basically the server takes a good hit, and if the network is down, so are the clients. However, it is easier to upgrade, backup, administer, and use, just as long as you can keep up your network. I highly recommend a good quality hub/switch for this depending on the size of your "workgroup".

The server installation, really is a piece of cake. It follows :

• Make sure to have an area with at least 190Mb of space free on the server. In addition, the installer must have read and write permissions on that area.
• Insert CD into server
• You will have to quit the auto run feature when you insert the cd, because it is defaulted for client installation not server.
• Using the "run" command line area, or a dos prompt, navigate to the setup.exe file.
• Run the setup.exe file with the /a option, for administrative. So your command line looks like "setup.exe /a".

There is plenty of other information in the readme file, but that is all there is to the server installation. Once it completes, you need to have the area shared for your clients, to be able to use. You should make it read-only, so that nothing gets updated, changed, or removed.

The client installation, is also a piece of cake, as mentioned earlier. It also follows :

• Make sure to have about 20Mb free on the client. I think that they state you only need about 12, but I think a little bit extra would be quite safe, especially if you are going to save your local documents there.
• You can run windows explorer, "run" from the start button, or an msdos prompt.
• Now simply type setup.exe in the proper directory, or just double click that executable if running windows explorer.