Office 2007 Pro BCM download mystery solved

 For the past couple of weeks, attendees of the US "Ready For A New Day" launch tour have been receiving the Launch 2007 Resource Kit.  There has been some confusion about two key areas so here's some clarification about both.

First, there are several downloads.  There are two for Office Professional 2007 and one for Office Groove 2007.  That's a total of three and trust me, it threw me for a loop as well.  When you go to download Office Professional 2007, you'll be presented with the screen at bottom.  I doctored the image slightly to blank out the key displayed.

Now many of you have been trained so that when you see a page like this, Download 1 and Download 2 are just mirror sites so pick which one suits your fancy.  That would be incorrect.   Download 1 is Office Professional 2007 CD1.  Download 2 is the second CD that contains Office Professional Business Contact Manager for Outlook 2007 and the Accounting Express 2007 software.  The Office downloads are a little over 350MG each.  The Groove download is a little less than 180MG.

This leads us to the second set of issues around what key to use.  I already blogged about that at https://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2007/01/20/singing-in-the-wrong-key.aspx.  The bottom line, install the downloaded .exe's using the key inside the Launch 2007 Resource Kit.  Ignore the email you receive.

 After you install the first Office download, you are free to install the BCM and Accounting Express 2007 components from the second download.  They aren't required installs and in fact, you can install them individually.

The second CD install of the BCM and Accounting software will install SQL Server 2005 Express and create the databases used for storage of the data.  Prior to doing that it'll likely install some fixes to the Dotnet Framework v2.0 components.  The install is pretty straightforward.  I had no issues on my Windows XP MCE 2005 machine.

In the case of Business Contact Manager 2007 for Outlook, the actual install happens the first time you launch Outlook 2007 after running the installs above.  It's a pretty painless process and you can either take the Express or Advanced routes in the install.  If you take the advanced route, you can pick registration options, pick the database name, etc.  The default values should be sufficient for most people.

I hope this clarifies any remaining questions on what you get, how to download, how to install, etc.  The rest of the fun is totally up to you.  Belated Merry Christmas !!!

[UPDATE]   Ok, I caved.  When someone tells me they have 1000's of people running 1024x768, I need to adjust.  So I moved the screenshot to the bottom out of the way of the text.  Hopefully this is better.  Cheers.