Office templates rollout

You can use Group Policy Preferences to accomplish this. It's just a little tricky. If you deploy a File preference, you can deploy each individual template file. Go to User Configuration\Preferences\File and add a new file. In the source, put the source file stored in a share. For the destination put %AppDataDir%\Microsoft\Templates\<filename> and set the Action to replace. Link the GPO to the OU that contains all the users you want to have this going for. When you do this, the files will be downloaded every time someone logs in, but if you change the Template file you just need to replace the file at the source location and it will be updated automatically when the users update group policy at login or at the refresh interval.

If you don't want to have the files downloaded at every login, you can change the action on the preference to update or create, and when you update the template files change it to Replace for a few days, then back to update. It's a little resource intensive and workload heavy, but it will work and doesn't requite third party utilities.

Thanks for recommendation, I will test it out. The PPT file is rather large and if downloaded every time can hinder performance. Is there a way to check on the new vs. deployed version and skip the download when there is a match?

I have a question in regards to the GP file approach (suggested by acbrown2010), how do you differentiate between WinXP and Win7 clients? The template paths are not the same.

Thanks for your help. Works like a charm.