Office 2007 deployment scripts

I received a question about deployment scripts for Office 2007. I’m not one of The Scripting Guys, but I think I can at least point you in the right direction.

If you are automating a deployment of Office 2007 with scripts, see our ORK article, Setup command-line options for the 2007 Office system. Note that Setup recognizes only a few command-line options in Office 2007, but you can make all the same modifications to the Office installation that you could in previous versions by using the Office Customization Tool (OCT) to set Setup properties and make other customizations. You can also edit the Config.xml for the product(s) you are installing. The above article on Setup command-line options has a command-line example for specifying the location of the Config.xml file.

Keep in mind that Setup.exe must be run as administrator, and you might be tempted to run a script with a runas administrator command and password in it, which I wouldn’t want to recommend because you’d be sending out your administrator password in plaintext for all to see.

Instead, you might consider creating a scheduled task that runs under the System account, as shown in Schtasks, which by default runs tasks with the permissions of the user logged on to the computer running SchTasks.

You can also check out these two articles by Dan Holme on WindowsITPro.com:

· Alternative Office 2007 Deployment Methods

· Automating Office 2007 Deployment

If you are using Group Policy with startup scripts, see our ORK article, Use Group Policy to assign computer startup scripts for 2007 Office deployment.

Two sources that could be of use if you want to use scripting with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit are:

· The Deployment Guys (blog)

· Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Team Blog

And do check out The Scripting Guys. They're good folks! I knew them ’way back when, and they’ve built a huge repository of useful scripts and script templates over the past few years.

- Andrea Weiss