Thanks to help from this forum, I have successfully moved our office deployment system away from individual portal installs and over to using the Office Deployment Tool.
The transition was mostly smooth.
I have one lingering question though, and that is about the status of the network install repository. The area where I downloaded the install files using the deployment tool and that our configuration scripts uses to install on individual machines. How do those files stay up to date?
Do we have to re-run the download command every so often to make sure those installation files are the most recent?