Office 2007: Integrate hotfixes and deploy
Written by Andreas Stenhall on Saturday, 13 of October , 2007 at 11:37 pm
The latest version of Office means new ways of customizing it and actually it differs from its predecessor Office 2003 as Microsoft implemented some new and not that logical changes in Office 2007. By following this guide you will learn how to make sure to apply all the Office updates during install and how to successfully deploy Office 2007 in your organization.
Add the updates and hotfixes to be included during installation
By adding all the updates and hotfixes released for Office 2007 to the updates folder they will be installed automatically during installation. The only thing is that you cannot just add the EXE files to the updates folder; you have to extract the Microsoft Windows Installer Patch files from the EXE files that you download from Microsoft Download Center for them to be applied during install. Do this by running for example:
outlook2007-kb933493-fullfile-x86-glb.exe /extract:c:\Office2007\Updates
This will unpack the MSP file from the EXE file so that you can put it in the Updates folder which is located in the root folder of the Office 2007 installation root directory. To find out which updates are needed you can always go to Microsoft Update and view the history of updates to see which updates have been installed previously and which updates you should download. You can of course also add other released hotfixes although they have not been released to Microsoft Update.
Customize Office 2007 the way you want it
To create a set of customized settings for Office 2007 you run setup.exe with the switch “admin”, just like:
setup.exe /admin
You can then enter for example the product key, which components you want to install, pre-configured account settings in outlook and much more. When you are done with the customization you save the file and name it for instance my customized settings.msp and put it in the Updates folder so that it will be deployed automatically during installation.
But, there is this big “but”. In Office 2007 you cannot automatically apply the updates and customizations from the Updates folder if you run setup using the MSI files, as you would do when deploying Office 2007 via group policies. The hotfixes and customizations from the Updates folder are only applied when you start the installation from the setup.exe file which is a very strange move for Microsoft to make as this makes it harder to deploy. However, do not fear, there are solutions to everything!
Deploy Office 2007 using group policies with customized settings
To be able to deploy Office 2007 with customized settings using grouo policies you must do this using a script. This script should check weather Office 2007 is already installed and after that decide if it should install it or not. The script can be downloaded from here, change the name of the text file to for instance office2007.bat. Then create a GPO for deploying Office 2007 and put this script in Computer configuration > Windows settings > Script (Startup/Shutdown) and choose “Start” and then click “Show files” and copy the script file there. Then click Add and enter the filename of the script in the Script name field.
Now there is just one more thing to do before you can deploy Office 2007 and that is to edit the config.xml file to make sure that the installation proceeds silently.
<Configuration Product=”Enterprise”>
<Display Level=”none” CompletionNotice=”no” SuppressModal=”yes” AcceptEula=”yes” />
<PIDKEY Value=”XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX” />
<USERNAME Value=”" />
<COMPANYNAME Value=”" />
<INSTALLLOCATION Value=”%programfiles%\Microsoft Office” />
<SOURCELIST Value=”file://share/Microsoft/Office2007Enterprise;” />
<DistributionPoint Location=”file://share/Microsoft/Office2007Enterprise” />
<Setting Id=”Reboot” Value=”IfNeeded” />
</Configuration>
Summary
In this article you have learned how to minimize patch handling for Office 2007 and to apply those and customize settings automatically during installation time. You have also learned how to deploy Office 2007 successfully, despite Microsoft’s cutback of the feature to deploy Office 2007 as a MSI package using GPOs.
<Display Level=”none” CompletionNotice=”no” SuppressModal=”yes” AcceptEula=”yes” />
<PIDKEY Value=”XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX” />
<USERNAME Value=”" />
<COMPANYNAME Value=”" />
<INSTALLLOCATION Value=”%programfiles%\Microsoft Office” />
<SOURCELIST Value=”file://share/Microsoft/Office2007Enterprise;” />
<DistributionPoint Location=”file://share/Microsoft/Office2007Enterprise” />
<Setting Id=”Reboot” Value=”IfNeeded” />
</Configuration>
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