How to install Office 2010 applications for a subset of users in your organization

We have received questions about how to install Microsoft Access 2010 only for some, but not all users in an organization. For example, some enterprises that are deploying Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 may want to deploy Access 2010 only to a subset of users.

In such cases, administrators can use the Office Customization Tool (the OCT is included in volume licensed versions of Office 2010 such as Office Professional Plus 2010) to create Setup customization .msp files in one of the following ways:

  • Create one Setup .msp file that sets the feature installation state for Microsoft Access to Not Available so that the users to whom you deploy this .msp file do not have Access 2010 installed on their computers. Then, if you do not have customizations that you want to preserve from the initial .msp file, create a new .msp file to set Access 2010 to Run all from My Computer so that Access 2010 is installed on users' computers.
  • Create an initial Setup customization .msp file and set the feature installation state for Microsoft Access to Not Available so that the users to whom you deploy the initial .msp file do not have Access 2010 installed on their computers. Then, use the OCT to import the initial customization .msp file to create a second customization .msp file, and configure the feature installation state for Microsoft Access to Run all from My Computer so that Access 2010 is installed on users' computers. If you use the import feature in this case, you are able to do a new customized deployment without needing to redo the common customizations because the import feature leverages the settings that you configured in the initial .msp file, and it allows you to change settings also.

The Set feature installation states area of the OCT is used to specify how Office features are installed (or not installed) on the user's computer. The following screenshot shows Microsoft Access set to Not Available so that Access will not be installed on users’ computers to which you deploy the Setup customization .msp file.

To set the feature installation state so that Access 2010 is installed on users' computers, you set the Microsoft Access feature installation state to Run all from My Computer:

The following resources provide more information: