Microsoft Office is an application suite composed of multiple applications. Each application contains dozens of configuration settings. In just about any-sized environment, you’ll want to roll out Office with some of those settings already customized to meet the needs of your users. You can do this with transforms and a special set of policy settings for Office.

Transforms allow you to tailor what applications are installed and how those applications are configured for first use. The special set of Administrative Templates for Office allow you to control and configure Office features through Group Policy in much the same way as you control Windows features. If you configure Office-related policy before you deploy Office, you can be sure that required configuration settings are already in place when users start up the new Office programs. Once you’ve deployed Office, you can use Office-related policy to manage the installation as well. You can also modify the setup of previously deployed applications using custom maintenance files, which are similar to transforms.

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