Dominic’s not-so-known-method of deploying Office 2007 in your Office 2003 environment, by using LANDesk and other tools available from the web.
Assumptions: LANDesk administrator, familiar with Office deployment and Office tools, familiar with some batch scripting and registry searching.
- First step is to customize your Office 2007 installation so that it fits your desired environment. To do this, you will need the Office Customization Tool, and/or the network path for the source installation location.
- You will want to install the Office 2007 Customization Tool located here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=73D955C0-DA87-4BC2-BBF6-260E700519A8&displaylang=en or you can run setup.exe /admin from your network Office 2007 share (source).
- Next is to run the tool and customize the Office package to meet your needs. An example can be located here: http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-fud-blog/2009/01/mediaedge-office-2007-deployme-4.html and the Microsoft guide is located here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178947.aspx
- Once you have created your .msp file, then place the file in the Updates folder in the Office 2007 network share (source). Here the Office setup will look in this folder when it executes the setup and thus setting up Office exactly as you intended.
- Because of the environment of the LANDesk package deployment and how the new Office 2007 is installed, you will want to run a batch file that calls out the setup of O2K7. (I was unsuccessful at getting LANDesk’s EXE package builder with switches necessary to install O2K7. The problem is, on the users’ end, it would come up with the Office 2007 Suite setup, giving them choices to install and this is bad. You need to specify which part of Office 2007 suite to install – this being only Office 2007 Pro Plus located in this subfolder of the Office 2007 Professional suite called ProPlus.WW.
- Here is the batch file command that you will want to use(place in source) and modify to your own servername\share:
- \\(servername)\(share)\office_2007\setup.exe /config \\(servername)\(share)\office_2007\ProPlus.WW\config.xml
- Now, you can create your LANDesk distribution package from the normal package wizard in the admin console and choose the batch package.
- From there you can then create your methods of deployment in the Scheduled Tasks; either using the Portal (pull it method) or a Push (push the package to the machines).
- Now that we have the install Office 2007 ready to go, next we want to remove Office 2007 that we have in our environment. (our current environment has Office 2003 as our main Full Office product installed with Office 2007 Share Point Services only. Note: if you only have Office 2003 installed across your machines, then you are pretty much done once you execute/push out the package, except for some testing and deployment pilots, etc. But, in our case, we have a mixture of both Office suites. One, being the Full O2K3 and a partial install of O2K7. So, for example, if you were to run the Setup of O2K7 on these machines, by default, the result would be it would ask you some choices: to repair, add features, or remove. So, with the next steps, this would get around the “choices” feature with a partial install. You would likely need to “silently” un-install O2K7 first, then run the O2K7 from the steps above. Note: when you run the batch file above, by default, it will remove Office 2003 automatically as part of the setup, and install Office 2007 as per your defined .msp file you created earlier. However, with a partial Office 2007 installed, it won’t continue on until you make those above mentioned choices, which we don’t want displayed to the user. So, when you are done, you are finished with a Full install of Office 2007 and 2003 is completely gone.
- The next step is to remotely uninstall just Office 2007 and not any other package, such as Visio 2007 (not exactly part of the office suite, yet installed on many computers in our environment) and such as MS Communicator 2007 or others such as OneNote 2007 and Project 2007. There is an Office 2007 tool out there on the web that works good at removing, but a little too good. It unfortunately removes ALL versions of Microsoft Office products and including the Communicator. This is bad, since you want to keep Visio, Project, OneNote, and Communicator and don’t want to have to circle back and re-install those applications. The tool is called ripoutoffice2007.exe and you can find it here: http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/04/10/uninstall-microsoft-office-2007-in-vista-and-xp/ However, for our environment, we want ONLY the Office 2007 (word, excel, powerpoint, access) gone and not the other extra Office products/features.
- To do this, I chose to use a tool that I scoured the web for, to do exactly what I want. I found this .vbs script that does what I need. I found it here: http://www.symantec.com/connect/downloads/uninstall-windows-installer-applications-using-vbscript What you have to do is, modify the .vbs file and insert your ProductCode of the product you are trying to uninstall. In my case, it was this ProductCode {90120000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}. I followed this as a guide to locate the product from Microsoft. Located here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928516
- “When you install a 2007 Office suite or one of the stand-alone 2007 Office programs, one or more product codes, or GUIDs, are created in the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UninstallEach GUID uses the following format: {BRMMmmmm-PPPP-LLLL-p000-D000000FF1CE}”
- So, I navigated to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall and located what best described what I was after to remove. Located the Display Name called Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 and copied the product code GUID to the correct location within the .vbs file that I downloaded from Symantec and save it.
- Next step was to test this by double-clicking the .vbs file and see what it does. Sure enough, it removes only the Office 2007 and nothing else. It didn’t force a reboot, because the script has switches to keep from requiring this. Note: by running this again (simulating a machine that doesn’t have Office 2007 partials or sharepoint services piece, it does nothing – another desired result)
- Now you can reboot at this point and log back in and deploy the package by pushing it or pulling it from the Portal if you have this setup already. However, I didn’t reboot and just tried it without rebooting first. It seemed to work fine. You may want to play with this, just to be on the safe side before you decide to implement a reboot first.
- The next step is to setup a batch file package with LANDesk to call out a .bat file, that calls the .vbs to execute since it doesn’t deploy .vbs files. What I’ve read so far is, within the .bat file, you use the format: cscript /nologo uninstall_script.vbs
- Lastly, for our environment, split the tasks into two steps for the user. Step one: uninstall Office 2007 and Step two: Install Office 2007. By the way I have you set this up, it should do the following:
- Un-installs partial Office 2007 installs so that a clean install can be performed without user intervention (except via LANDesk portal if you choose to do it this way, then they need to deploy it to themselves). And then, Install Office 2007 (which will automatically and quietly uninstall Office 2003 along with setting up Office 2007 specified exactly how your .msp file is configured for your machines.
- Pilots and testing is last…
- Then you can deploy at will.
I hope this helps you in your journey to upgrading your Office clients, with little to no user intervention and without having to go to each machine to do this manually.
Dominic