Slipstreaming your Sharepoint installation, easy!

If you have been regularly installing Sharepoint farms you might notice that in the last 12 months there has been a large amount of time consuming hotfixes to deploy with each server installation of both WSS and MOSS.  With MOSS you've got all the WSS ones as well as the copious amount of MOSS hotfixes.

Here is the current patch path as recommended by the Microsoft Sharepoint Team :

1. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1
2. The 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Service Pack 1
3. The Windows SharePoint Services Infrastructure Update x86 x64
4. The Microsoft Office Servers Infrastructure Update x86 x64
5. KB 953397: Excel Server Security Update x86 x64
6. KB 955586: Document Lifecycle Workflow Update
7. August Cumulative Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Global)
8. August Cumulative Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Local)
9. August Cumulative Update for Microsoft Office Servers

Wow thats a few patches needed!  I started to get fairly jack of installing these before I was even installing 3 – 9, so heres a really brief and easy way to slipstream the install.

1. Download all of the above patches
2. Take a copy of the MOSS dvd.  Keep note of the path you copied this to.
3. One by one use the following syntax to pull out all of the information from the hotfixes :

hotfixname.exe /extract:<path to moss folder>x86updates /passive

This will extract all the files in the hotfix to your copy of the MOSS DVD x86update folder. 

Now when you run setup, you wont need to spend half an hour patching afterwards.  For WSS the same principle applies, except use the WSS patches only, and probably start with the WSS 3.0 SP1 installer.