Installing Office on an Exchange Server

[Randy McGlenn II]

Does anybody have any opinions on this?

Mine has been that you shouldn't install client software on a server, and therefore it would be bad practice to install Office on an Exchange server. I want to know what others think about this.

[Ganesh Babu · Accepted solution]

Hi Randy,
In my old projects.. we had used the office in the exchange server for some automation purposes and even used the client in that server. BUt before doing that we had made all planning such that it will not affect the performance of the exchange server in any way.

Ganesh

[Jon Finley]

My personal opinion is that a Server should NEVER have client software installed on it.... unless.. the client software is necessary to perform some sort of a maintenance or recovery function.

Less change of a random User problem occuring at a critical time.

Jon

[Randy McGlenn II]

Thanks for the replys. Now if I may play Devil's Advocate...

So if it is not a good idea to put client software on a server, has there been any instances where doing so has been a problem (like say, in Exchange)? Is there any documentation regarding this? I have looked around on Microsoft a little bit and so far could not find anything to prove one way or the other.

[Patrick Ruane_1]

In the few times I've installed Office on a server, I've not had any problems. I've heard the same suggestion about not installing client software on a server and it was my belief that exchange 5.5 and Outlook 97 couldn't be installed on the same server. My main reason for not doing this would be to save system resources as Office is pretty fat. If you want to install Outlook on your exchange server for troubleshooting, that should be fine, but not for regular use. After all, if Office does crash (which it often does) you don't want it to bring down your server.

Patrick.

[Venkatesan_3]

It'll be a bad pratice to install client software in Server system. As it'll occupy Cpu utilization & memory, as you know now a days the latest viruses are affecting the system on those system - the Client software ( office) is installed.

[Sandra Ellis]

It's my opinion that this would not come under the "best practices" criteria. The below link is for a Microsoft article relating to Server and Office 2003 where it states at the end of the article that "Office 2003 is not supported on computers that run Exchange Server 2003."

I would interpret this as Microsoft saying 'it is not a good idea'.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;820283

[Gary Cooper_1]

Hi Randy,

I don't know what version of Windows server you're running, but have a look at:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q266418

Regards,

Gary

[Randy McGlenn II]

Great replies! Thanks for the Microsoft articles. I'd give bunnies to those if I knew how.

Thank you for the valuable information!