Office Setup Installers Customisation Guide for Office 2003, 2007 Office System and Office XP.
In this guide, you will learn how to customise the Microsoft Office products to fit the needs of your business enterprise.
Ever wanted to pre-configure your exchange server settings in Outlook? Perhaps you only want Word, Excel and Outlook installed and not PowerPoint and Access? Or maybe you just want to deploy an up-to-date Office Package with the latest Service Packs and have it pre-activated so your users don't face having to register and activate everytime someone new uses the package!
Either way, this guide is for you! And remember, it's not just businesses that can take advantage of this, it is the consumer to, to save value human hours reconfiguring your office suites on reinstall.
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Office 2007 Customised Install
Microsoft Office 2007 is the easiest version of Office for customisation as all the tools you need to configure it for enterprise deployment are built right into setup! Yes that's right - no resource kits needed to obtain the Office Customization Wizard.
So, we need to do the following to make Office 2007 install with your own customised settings. NOTE: This procedure only works with certain editions of Microsoft Office 2007 (Volume License Editions: Office Standard 2007, Office Small Business 2007, Office Professional Plus 2007, and Office Enterprise 2007). To determine if your 2007 Office suite installation is a volume licensed version, check the 2007 Office suite installation disk to see if it contains a folder named Admin. If the Admin folder exists, this disk is a volume license edition.
Do the following:
- If you haven't already done so, copy the contents of the Microsoft Office 2007 DVD to your Hard Disk (C:\Office2007);
- Optionally, insert (slipstream) the latest Office 2007 Service Pack into this install folder.
- If you are dealing with customising any version of Office with a service pack (Service Pack 2 for example features new files that need to be supplied in the Customisation Tool), you need to additionally download the 2007 Office System ADM Template and OCT files to ensure your office customisation wizard takes advantage of the later service pack features!;
- If you have Service Pack 2 or above, and have downloaded the file from above, install and extract the file. Inside the extracted folder is an "Admin" file. These files need to be copied to your "Admin" folder in your C:\Office2007\Admin (replace any existing files). Now you have an updated Office CUstomisation Tool!
- Run the Office Customisation Tool (OCT) from the command line:
C:\Office2007\setup.exe /admin- When you run the OCT, you have a choice to create a new Setup customisation (MSP) file or to open an existing MSP file. If you are creating a new file, the OCT displays a list of the products that are available on the network installation point. You must select a single product that you want to customise.
- Run through the wizard, customising everything to your hearts content! Pay particular attention to "Organisation Name", "CD KEY", "User Name" (Environment Variables work), and the Outlook section where you can specify your exchange server and other preferences.
- Save your customisations in a Setup MSP file. You place the file created in the Updates folder on the network installation point or local folder such as C:\Office2007\Updates. When you install Office, Setup looks for a Setup customization file in the Updates folder and applies the customisations. The Updates folder can only be used for deploying software patches during an initial installation of 2007 Office system!
- As an alternative to placing the customisation MSP file in the Updates folder, you can use the Setup command-line option /adminfile to specify the fully-qualified path to the location of the MSP file. For example, type: setup.exe /adminfile \\server\share\mychanges\custom.msp.
Office 2003/Office XP Installation Customisation
Office 2003 and Office XP are different to the way the 2007 (and forthcoming 2010) Office System work. Instead of placing custom setup files in an "updates" folder which the Office Installation will detect during install, instead you must create and specify an Office "Transformation" file.
If you are using Office XP, follow the same procedure below but substitute the Office 2003 Resource Kit with the Office XP Resource Kit.
- Perform an administrative installation of Microsoft Office into your Hard Disk or Share by running: X:\Office2003\setup.exe /a
Assuming X is your CD Drive Letter
- Then, download the Office 2003 Resource Kit which amongst other things includes the Office Customisation Wizard. Install this Resource Kit - you shall see new menu items in the Start Menu as below:
- If you have Office 2003 Service Pack 3 slipstreamed into the administrative install, or Office is already patched with SP3, you need to download the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 Administrative Template pack and do the following:
- Extract the pack by executing the installer
- Copy all of the extracted OPA files to your \Program Files\ORKTools\ORK11\Tools\SHARED folder.
- Start the "Custom Installation Wizard" from the start menu. There are 24 screens, but not all of which will need to be configured; You can skip what you don't need.
- In the first step, specify the MSI file you will be transforming. This will be the file on the Office 2003 installation folder e.g. c:\Office2003\PRO11N.MSI (for Professional edition).
- Next, choose to create a new MST file (you can also modify a previously created MST file in this step);
- Specify the name and path of the new MST file, i.e., C:\Office2003\company.mst. In this step, a drop-down menu of all the Wizard's screens appears;
In the later steps you specify a product key, Office installation settings (e.g. Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Word, but NOT access, for example);
You may also configure any of the user options for the Office 2003 apps. Commonally Outlook 2003 can change the default location for PST files.
- When you are done, click Finish. Your MST file is then saved to the location you specified.
- Now you can run Microsoft Office 2003/XP installation via the command line, whilst specifying this custom MST file to ensure all of your users receive office in the same format with all your pre-configured settings by typing:
C:|Office2003\setup.exe TRANSFORMS=C:\Office2003\company.mst /qb-- You can optionally use Group Policy to deploy Microsoft Office with the transforms file you've just created. Learn more about installing software via Group Policy.
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