Corel WordPerfect Office family of products are, in my honest opinion, better products than their competitors, as of the 1998 year, and version 7 of the products. However, with the poor marketing of their product, it appears that it is being "wiped out" by Microsoft Office. I think WordPerfect is easier and more powerful, but I am definately the minority. Now there are much newer version available, that offer new security risks, so I am still evaluating. In addition Sun now offers a free Star Office product that gives a GOOD run for its "money". Well, I digress .....

I will document some of what it took to install it 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 pretty easy. It follows :

• Make sure to have an area with at least 134Mb of space free on the server, preferably 287Mb for a full installation. In addition, the installer must have read and write permissions on that area.
• Insert CD into server
• It is not neccessary to remove any prior installations of WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, or PerfectOffice.
• There is a potential problem with the comctl32.dll file after installation, if you run a version of MSIE 3.0 or newer. Potentially the newer file will create problems for Corel products, so make a backup of the current comctl32.dll file first. If you dont know where it is, use the "find" option on the start menu.
• 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 netsetup.exe file.
• Run the netsetup.exe file to begin installation.

There is plenty of other information in the readme files, specifically cowin7.txt and networks.txt, 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 a piece of cake, --- so long as you dont want to use it on NT. It was not certified on NT for Corel Office Professional. It also follows :

• Make sure to have about 10Mb 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. For the record, most of my client machines dont even use 5Mb.
• You can run "run" from the start button, or an msdos prompt.
• Make sure that the network server has the proper directory shared, you have read permission on it, and I will assume it is called "OurServer", and that the share is called "Applications".
• First the easy way - find the "CO7Setup" or "Corel Office Professional 7 Setup" on the shared directory and run it.
• Now the hard way - type the following string into the prompt : "\\OurServer\Applications\Corel\Office7\AppMan\Setup\SETUP.EXE /Setfile="\\OurServer\Applications\Corel\Office7\AppMan\Setup\COI7us.set"

This will begin the client installation side, and I always choose the "run from server" option, to minimize my administrative nightmares.

I have about 10 or 15 documents from Corel, from that time, that state they are fully UNC compatible. However, I had installed them on a specific machine, and then that machine died. Lucky for me, my application was installed on a secondary drive. So I built a new machine, called it the same name, mounted the dead machines second drive, made sure the share name matched, and was ready to go. It would not work at all however. I ended up needing to reinstall it, but these things should not happen.

In addition, I originally tried to install this entire product to an NFS mounted share, on an AIX machine, and it would not work either. That was complete UNC compatible, but this product would not work at all, hence the switch to the machine in the paragraph above (which proceeded to die on me anyway).