Office 2010 Deployment Kit for APP-V
This morning I came across the Office 2010 deployment kit for APPV, so I figured why not give this a go…
I had already downloaded the office 2010 beta and have an appv client and sequencer running in 4.6 RC for a while already in my 4.5 SP1 environment.
The thing is, I do not really get the purpose of this deployment kit so far; You have to install it on your sequencer machine before creating the 2010 package AND on the client. I did find that it installs a licensing service which can be configured with the included OSPP.vbs script.
On with the preparation part, First of all I created a transform file for Office 2010. this can still be done with the command line setup /admin (hurray for that !). While comparing the OCT from office 2010 with the one in Office 2007, I noticed some new things in there. Fortunately they did not change the majority that was already there…
The first thing I noticed is that you can configure your KMS host for office 2010 licensing from within the OCT wizard:
Under the Modify User Settings part of the wizard I noticed an entry Disable Items in User Interface where you can choose to disable commands or shortcut keys for a certain office application. Configuration of the Outlook Cached Exchange mode is now brought under the Exchange part instead of elsewhere like in office 2007, good one!
Another useful entry in there is the File Block Settings where you can configure whether users can open, view or edit office application files for a large number of different versions:
Time to save my customizations into an MSP file
On with the sequencing part (after installing the Office deployment kit on the sequencer machine)
If you haven’t been able to try out the slightly revamped sequencer of APPV 4.6, it acts similar but yet more user-friendly. For instance, it doesn’t minimize any longer on the point where you have to start the actual installation:
The rest of the steps are quite similar as any other application sequencing, so I’m not going to describe them (fyi: I haven’t activated Office 2010 yet).
Saved the Sequence and imported it into my APPV console.
On my 4.6 test client, the Office 2010 sequence launched really well. But oops, haven’t installed the deployment kit on that client yet… Strangely enough Office did not complain, but shows unlicensed version in the titlebar. After installing the Office 2010 deployment kit for Appv on my test system with appv 4.6 rc I imported my license with the following command: cscript ospp.vbs -inpkey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX (note: you must replace the X’s). Right before this Office 2010 asked for the license, copy-paste didn’t work ?? So now the license is present, but Office 2010 is still not activated…
I guess the option to insert the Office 2010 licence into our KMS server will be the best one, less work and no fiddling around. The Office 2010 deployment kit for APPV might come in handy in some cases, but will need some documentation first…
