26 Mar 09 Office 2007 Deployment
There are several deployment methods for Office 2007. Many detailed instructions can be found on Microsoft’s site and other Microsoft Partner sites.
This is the process we used to migrate from Office 97 to Office 2007.
Setting Up the package:
Microsoft Office comes with the Office Customization Tool (OCT) this tool will allow you to customized everything from which programs to install to each and any detail level you want in these programs. To access the OCT, you run the setup.exe with the /admin option.
After your settings have been modified, the file will have a .MSP file extension. You should name this file with a 1 in front of the file name. This will ensure that the .MSP file will run first before any other updates (if you have any).
We first created a simple deployment package with all the programs and folder redirect settings, as well as shortcuts and individual program options.
We also streamlined our installation package with Service pack 2. This can be done by downloading the SP2 exe file and extracting the contents using the /extract :{FILE LOCATION}. Once all the files have been extracted, copy all MSP files into the Office deployment package in the folder ‘Updates”.
You can also put any other updates to be deployed in the Updates folder (we also deployed the SaveAsPDFandXPS.exe). Keep in mind that the folder needs to contain the .MSP files and be sure to keep your OCT MSP file with a 1 in the beginning the file name.
Removing Office 97:
Office 97 needed to be removed from all client PC’s. To avoid having to manually un-install Office 97 from over 100 PC’s, we deployed a script that removes Office 97.
You can use the Microsoft Office97 removal tool, located here. These exe files can be used in a script to completely remove Office from your PC. We have modified the login script to perform this action.
The script has also been configured to restart the PC to begin the Office 2007 deployment.
Office 2007 Install:
We used Group Policies to automatically run a “Shutdown” script that will run the Office 2007 installation from a shared Network location.
All we needed to do was turn on a PC, run a script to perform a clean un-install of Office 97, then initiate a shutdown command. The shutdown command would then kick off the shutdown script to install Office 2007 with SP2.
This process was setup using Active Directory and Group Policies on 112 PCs.
Post-Installation Notes:
We noticed that out of the 112 PCs, 8 PC did not correctly install Service Pack 2.
3 PCs did not correctly add all of the customization settings as setup.
Microsoft Office configuration (with-out MS Exchange) was time-consuming. This process entailed importing all pop email accounts settings (some PCs had up to 15 accounts) and importing all emails/address books.
Using group-polices, we set software restrictions on Outlook Express. This prevented users from going back to Outlook Express for e-mail. This small policy has made a big difference in moving to Outlook 2007.
