Microsoft stunts Office 2007 GPO deployment

In the past it's been pretty easy to push a new version of Office to a group of users with Group Policies. For some reason MS thought this was a bad idea so they had to make things harder in 2007.

Sure they give you the great Office Customization Tool, but they don't let you use those files with a network install. All you get to use is a lousy config.xml file that hardly lets you pick what options to install. It won't even let you install over an existing 2003 installation, it leaves both versions on the computer. Not only that, the install doesn't finish until a user logs in. Why can't this happen pre-login?

My only real option is to use SMS server (which isn't an available option) or to write a login script to do it all for me. Isn't this why we use GPO's in the first place? I've pushed software 'manually' before so it's not terribly hard but WTF? Gee thanks Microsoft, you guys really out did yourselves this time.