Todd's Blog

There was a comment to my post on deploying Microsoft Office 2007 from Jeff Sears who has a working solution for getting this going. I think it is worthy of its own post, so here is Jeff’s working solution.

Thanks Jeff

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I successfully installed Office 2007 using a GPO. It took me a lot of trial and error, and I’m happy to share my knowledge to save others time. Here’s how I did it. However, I couldn’t get the Save As PDF .msi to chain on to the end, so I simply created a separate GPO to install it.

I’m installing Office 2007 Standard with an Open License.

1. Create a network share, for example \\myserver\office_2007
2. Copy the Office 2007 CD in its entirety to the share.
3. The Standard.WW folder contains the .msi file you’ll use for a GPO installation. (I’m pretty sure this is true for any Office 2007 product—that is, use the .WW folder’s .msi for a GPO installation.) On the share go into the Standard.WW folder and edit the config.xml file for your specific needs. Here is how mine looks:
   

   <Configuration Product=“Standard”>

         <Display Level=“basic” CompletionNotice=“no” SuppressModal=“no” AcceptEula=“yes” />

         <PIDKEY Value=“abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy” />

         <COMPANYNAME Value=“My Company” />

         <DistributionPoint Location=“\\My_Server\Office_2007” />

         <Setting Id=“Reboot” Value=“IfNeeded” />

   </Configuration>

4. If you need instructions on what the various options mean in this config.xml file, go here http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/e16af71c-fed4-40da-a886-95e596c3999e1033.mspx?mfr=true , which is in the Office 2007 Resource Kit instructions.

5. Build your GPO on your domain controller as follows. Create a new GPO and name it something like Office 2007 Deployment. Right-click, Edit this GPO and go Computer Configuration, Software Settings, Software installation. Right-click Software Installation and choose New Package. Browse to the StandardWW.msi on the share you created above. I chose Assigned, OK. You should now see the ‘Microsoft Office Standard 2007’ package listed in the right pane of your Software Installation item. Right-click on the ‘Microsoft Office Standard 2007’, Properties. Click the Deployment tab and then check ‘Uninstall this application when it falls out of the scope of management.’ (This automatically uninstalls the package if the computer is removed from the container (s) this GPO is applied to). OK.
6. I then enabled my GPO to run against my Organization Unit. So on my domain controller, I have an Organization Unit called Client PCs. In my Group Policy MMC, I right-clicked on my Client PCs OU, chose ‘Link an Existing GPO’ and chose the ‘Office 2007 Deployment’ which I created back in step 4. Finally I left-clicked on my Office 2007 Deployment GPO, and I see in the Links pane on the right that it is linked to my Client PCs OU. In the bottom right pane (Security Filtering), I clicked on Authenticated Users and Remove. I then clicked Add, click the Object Types button and check Computers, OK, then added the specific computers I want this GPO to be applied to.
7. I noticed that client PCs only check in every few hours with the domain controller, which means it will take a while for Office 2007 to get installed. I wanted to force Office 2007 to get installed right away to a few PCs, so I went to them individually, opened a command prompt and typed ‘gpupdate /force’. They then come back with a message that in order for some policies to be applied, you must reboot. Say Yes, and after the reboot you’ll see Office start to install. It takes about 5 minutes, so don’t be in a hurry.
8. I then created a Save as PDF GPO in exactly the same way, except that you don’t have to configure a config.xml file. The .msi will install without any user intervention.

The final thing I noticed was the first time a user runs Office 2007, there are two screens of popups about using Help online if connected to the internet, automatically install updates, etc. If you want to eliminate those screens, then you’ll need build a GPO for Office 2007 using the adm templates files that Todd has provided a link to.

Best of luck to you.

I am rolling out a new server at work this week. It is running Windows 2003 Enterprise and it will have 2 virtual machines on it, one for WSS and WSUS. When I first got it going the first update was Service Pack 2. I installed SP2, no big deal but it does turn RIS in WDS. Everything seemed ok, so next I built the firstVM, base image and got it patched.

Now  I want to just image the first VM so I don’t have to reinstall and what not. The easiest way is to Sysprep shutdown, make a copy the vhd as your base image. You can then create a differencing disk from this image or just copy the VHD to a new filename and use the new file. I chose the later so I can easily move the VHD around to different machines.

I also wanted to test WDS, because I could. So I got WDS running on the host machine, put the boot.wim and install.wim into WDS.

Now how the heck do you capture an image?

Searched the internet, found out you need to right click on the boot image and create a capture image. Did that, then add it into the install images. The machine boots then asks to capture the image. It will ask you where you want to copy the image.

You can’t send it directly to the server when you create it, if you try that option, you can’t click finish. Microsoft claims this is to protect it from data coruption. I only had one partition in my vm, so it wanted to save the image to the same partition I was capturing. I didn’t bother creating a second partition to store the image to,  so I went with just copying the VHD file. I’ll try this again with the computers in the library once I move ther server over.  

Here is the technet forum link I found for capturing an image.