Wednesday, January 31, 2007
blog in transition
I'm in the process of transitioning my blog from the dirteam.com blog site to here. So, for the time being I'll be double-posting but if you want to see what I've been blogging about, you can go here
What were they thinking??--the Office product team strikes again
In a previous post, I talked about the changes that MS made to Office 2007 for deployment via Group Policy. Since I wrote that post, they have pulled the article I referenced so that it is now only available via the cached Google copy. I also went ahead and tried using this method myself--creating an Office 2007 distribution point and customizing it with a config.xml file. All I can say is that once again, the Office product group has made decisions that seem to completely disregard the world around them, in favor of who knows what invisible force that drives them. They have completely made a mess of GP-based deployment of Office--a mode which I know many, many administrators have used for deployment of this behemoth package in the past. It is truly sad what they have done to this. Several people have asked me how to make this work and I just have no good answer for them. Here's what I did, in the hopes that it helps others.
What I simply wanted to do is take my version of Vista Ultimate 2007 and deploy just Outlook, Powerpoint, Word & Excel to a computer (note that per-user deployments of Office 2007 are no longer supported). Of course, I also wanted to plug in my product id so users wouldn't have to enter it. So I modified the config.xml file that came with Office and put it in my distribution point and then rebooted my test client to pick it up. Well, the first time I logged in, after Office 2007 showed that it was installing on the reboot, I indeed had a new Office 2007 program group in my Start Menu but, ironically, it contained shortcuts to all of the applications I had excluded! So, I clicked on one of the shortcuts and it launched this Office Configuration utility, which proceeded to churn away for a while. When I came back to my test system, I was no longer logged in. It had presumably rebooted or logged me out after doing its thing. When I next logged in, only the applications I had expected to find were finally there, with one exception. Despite the fact that my config.xml was excluding Access, it was indeed showing up on the Start Menu. So, it almost worked...[:P]
I've also heard other reports that if you deploy Office 2007 via GP to a system that already has Office 2003, that it will not upgrade that 2003 install but instead will install side-by-side with the older version...yea, that makes sense. Most people want to use two versions of Office...
Needless to say, this is much worse than the way it used to be in Office 2003. My advice--if you use Group Policy to deploy Office today, don't plan on using it to deploy Office 2007.
Just in case you're curious, here is the config.xml I used to customize my Office 2007 installation. The PIDKEY element is where you enter your Product ID. According to the docs, its not supposed to pick up your Company Name but in my case, it did. And, its the OptionState elements where you specify which apps you want (or don't want). The id tags that I use below come from the setup.xml file that exists in the same directory as the Office MSI. However, as you can see below,they are not altogether intuitive. For example, XDOCSFiles is InfoPath! Go figure...
What I simply wanted to do is take my version of Vista Ultimate 2007 and deploy just Outlook, Powerpoint, Word & Excel to a computer (note that per-user deployments of Office 2007 are no longer supported). Of course, I also wanted to plug in my product id so users wouldn't have to enter it. So I modified the config.xml file that came with Office and put it in my distribution point and then rebooted my test client to pick it up. Well, the first time I logged in, after Office 2007 showed that it was installing on the reboot, I indeed had a new Office 2007 program group in my Start Menu but, ironically, it contained shortcuts to all of the applications I had excluded! So, I clicked on one of the shortcuts and it launched this Office Configuration utility, which proceeded to churn away for a while. When I came back to my test system, I was no longer logged in. It had presumably rebooted or logged me out after doing its thing. When I next logged in, only the applications I had expected to find were finally there, with one exception. Despite the fact that my config.xml was excluding Access, it was indeed showing up on the Start Menu. So, it almost worked...[:P]
I've also heard other reports that if you deploy Office 2007 via GP to a system that already has Office 2003, that it will not upgrade that 2003 install but instead will install side-by-side with the older version...yea, that makes sense. Most people want to use two versions of Office...
Needless to say, this is much worse than the way it used to be in Office 2003. My advice--if you use Group Policy to deploy Office today, don't plan on using it to deploy Office 2007.
Just in case you're curious, here is the config.xml I used to customize my Office 2007 installation. The PIDKEY element is where you enter your Product ID. According to the docs, its not supposed to pick up your Company Name but in my case, it did. And, its the OptionState elements where you specify which apps you want (or don't want). The id tags that I use below come from the setup.xml file that exists in the same directory as the Office MSI. However, as you can see below,they are not altogether intuitive. For example, XDOCSFiles is InfoPath! Go figure...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
