OpenOffice 3.3.0 silent installation through SCCM

You are probably dealing with an installer that was built using "Custom" dialog boxes and scripts that do not support the silent mode install or uninstall.

You could try running the installer using this :

setup.exe /s /f1"%cd%\uninstall.iss" /verbose"%cd%\logging.txt"

Which will create an MSI engine logging file. This is very verbose, but that might help you troubleshooting this issue. But this unlikely...

Unfortunately, I recently troubleshooted that same kind of issue in a setup I had the code for, and that "ErrorCode=-3" is pretty much useless, ranging from internal MSI variables not being set, to error messages being displayed by the installer and not being handled properly...

Every year or two, I install OpenOffice and the problem is the same - documents don't format/translate quite right to/from their MS Office counterparts.

It doesn't seem to be overly wacko-paranoid to observe that Microsoft is good at stamping out competition. All they need to do is tweak things just a bit in each service pack & patch to make sure things don't translate quite right, and they continue to lock me in, because I don't have the resources to handle the additional support requests.

I think this is surmountable if:

• your users are extremely flexible
• most documents leave your office in a different format (say, PDF)
• you don't do a lot of document sharing outside the organization

Otherwise, I'd say the business disruption is more costly than the licenses (unfortunately).