One of the things that kept us to imaging hard drives in the past was the installation of Office on all of the machines. It was just faster to setup a machine and copy the hard drives to other computers. Now we have the ability to deploy software, and Office 2010 which takes about 9 minutes per machine.
Deploying Office 2010 requires many steps for the preparation of the software in order to be deployed. Once it is setup, it can then be sent out to any machine on the network with very little effort of the user and a technician. The following steps are how to prepare the software, following by the directions on how to deploy it out over the network.
Download and convert the .iso file
To get the distribution of Office 2010 from MicroSoft, you have to download the .iso file from the Volume License Center. All of the .iso files need to be converted to either .exe or .msi installs in order to distribute them over the network.
Once you have downloaded the .iso, double click on it and it will open up like a zip file. If you are on an older version of Windows, you can download 7zip and use it to extract out the data files. Copy all of the files into a folder that is shared on the network to begin to prepare it for distribution. Our folder is located at: \\tpaw-01\installs\gpo\Office2010\. Although I am not distributing this via the GPO, that folder structure is setup with the security for software distribution.
Prepare Office for Silent Installation
The next step is to prepare Office for the silent installation. You can also configure what you want to install within the Office software. To do this, you need to run the Office Customization Tool (OCT).
- Go to the folder where the setup.exe is location.
- Hold down shift, and right click somewhere in the folder.
- Select Open command prompt at this location.
- type in setup /admin
- The Office Customization Tool will open.
There are many settings you can change in the customization tool, and what you do is save the file as a .MSP file that is used during the installation. The screen below shows implementing the MAK security key, turning on the silent installation options (note: the first attempt at this did not turn on all of the silent options and the deploy never ended… make sure you have all of these turned on).
You can also add other options and variables for things like auto activation and no reboot. Both of which we added to our .MSP file.
You can also configure what components you want to install and what not to install. This came in handy since we are now a Google school district and we did not want to install Outlook. We also turned off some of the other applications we don’t use such as Visio, InfoPath, One Drive, and One Note.
Now, once all of the configurations were completed, we save the .MSP file into the same directory of the setup.exe. This file can be placed anywhere, you will just need to remember where it is located for the distribution process.
For more details on using the Office Customization Tool, see this link or the following video… We did not use the directions exactly in the following video, but it was a great reference tool on how to setup the distribution.
Preparing PDQ Deploy
With PDQ Deploy you can get your deployment underway in moments. First, create a new package. (File > New Package or Ctrl + N).
- By default, an install step is available. Put in the setup.exe file for the Install File
- Add silent parameters. For Office 2016 that would be /adminfile [name of MSP file]
- Check Include Entire Directory. Don’t miss this step. If you don’t check this your install will fail.
The following screen is from the documentation:
Here is our configuration:
Download/Install the Office 2010 Admin Templates
We had to add a new GPO so that when the user ran office for the first time, the screen didn’t pop-up asking for feedback preferences to MicroSoft. In order to set this GPO, we had to download and install the Office 2010 Admin Templates for GPO. This only has to be done once, but we are documenting here in case we have to rebuild a server in the future. To download the template connect to:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18968
The video above has a segment on how to install these templates if you need directions.
Office 2010 – Suppress Recommended Settings
We create a GPO using the Office 2010 Admin Template and applied it at the domain level so that all computer users would get the GPO. This is located at:
Users > Policies > Administrative Templates > MicroSoft Office > Miscellaneous > Suppress recommended settings dialog
When you enable this policy, that pop-up window does not pop-up.
The Deployment
This is a deployment package in our PDQ Deploy called, Deploy Office 2010. You can deploy that to any machine that needs Office 2010, it should take about 9-10 minutes for the software to install. This does not require a reboot, but does require a log-off for all of the icons to work correctly.