Todd's Blog

I have received quite a few comments on my Office 2007 deployment post telling me people were having troubles to make it work. I thought well, let me try this again in my virtual environment from the top and I’ll get some screen shots. I followed my old procedure, everything was good up to the point of applying the MSP file. Like what everyone else was seeing, it didn’t apply it against the machine. Weird I thought, let me try this again, rebooted the virtual PC and cleared the changes. It installed Office 2007 via Group Policy again and again, the MSP file wasn’t applied. I tried chaning the XML file and all that did was prevent the Group Policy from deploying the application. This was a couple of weeks back, and I haven’t had much time to revisit it yet. I see what everyone is saying now.

The differences between my virtual machine lab and the production environment is that the lab is Windows 2003 SP1 and the production environment is Windows 2003 R2. I can’t see that making any difference but you never know. I will try rolling that out in my virtual lab and see what happens.

My interest is peaked now though and I want to solve this problem. I don’t want to have to use SMS or scripts to deploy Office 2007.

Stay Tuned.

I was talking with the boss last week about upgrading our departments computers to Office 2003. We talked about it and decided on Office 2007.

Today, we have a few staff away so I am needed to answer phones. I thought since I was chained to my desk, I might as well start planning the deployment for Office 2007. I popped the Office DVD into the laptop and at the command prompt in the root of D:> , typed Setup /a . That doesn’t work in 2007, a screen comes up telling you the valid arguments though. setup /admin apparently works, so I typed that. This brings up a setup utility which creates the MSP file. I went in and filled in my settings, and I also found in there the options to change which format the files are saved in. So I set that up properly and saved the file.

That is great and all, now what about a distribution point? A little search and I found out you just copy the DVD to a network distrobution point.

I also discovered some other useful things:

• a compatiblity pack for Office 2000, XP and 2003 which allow you to open Office 2007 documents.
• a save to PDF option for Office 2007.
• adm templates for 2007 Office System. The article was titled “Using Group Policy to set default file save options”

I think this is going to be easier than I thought.

First, I copied the DVD to my software share. Then I extracted the Save to PDF file and put it into it’s own directory.  I then reopened OCT and added the Save to PDF executable as a program to install after Office 2007 is installed. I saved the changes and dropped the MSP file into the updates folder within the Office 2007 share folder. If you want different options for different groups of people but want to use the same distrobution point, don’t put the msp file into updates. A technet article describes the process you need to follow here. I then went into Group Policy and setup GP to deploy Office 2007. I also set the Group Policy options for the file saving format.  Here is a good word document on deploying Office 2007 as well.

I rebooted the machine and Office 2007 installed and my save as options are all what I want them to be. Couldn’t be simpler.

Update

use http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/ to access the Office resource kit. I also changed the link above. People were getting a page not found message.

Update 2

I remember seeing somewhere that MSP files only work with the select and Enterprise Agreement media. It doesn’t work on the retail copies.