February 2005

From the desk of the Office IT Shop Guy

On the day you have to install Office on every desktop in your organization, your normally tame workplace can turn into a jungle. Relax, put your feet up, and pull out the right tools for the job. You can get it all done without ever leaving your cage.

Applies to
Office 2003

You can accomplish just about anything with enough brute force and blind determination. If you don’t believe me, just visit the playground of your local elementary school at recess. Or watch the evening news. Or drop by the IT Shop on the first day of a major software upgrade campaign. It’s a war zone around here. Frankly, it makes me question the whole concept of evolution. Does every step we take move us forward? Not if we were stumbling around in circles to begin with.

Whatever happened to class? Doing things with a bit of grace and flair. Especially when it comes to software deployment, a little finesse definitely gives you an advantage.

Apparently the new guy in the cubicle by the window does not share my opinion. We’re still wondering how he scored the window view, but at the time we figured he must be pretty smart, or at least well connected. So when it came time to deploy Office 2003, we did him a favor. We gave him the Marketing department. Only 350 desktops, a small company-within-the company, with a unique Office configuration and an enthusiastic bunch of users. How hard could it be?

To give him as much credit as I possibly can, he might be one of those exercise fanatics—I don’t know why else an intelligent human being would carry the same CD from desktop to desktop 350 times. But it can’t be ergonomically intelligent to install Office 2003 that way, especially when you consider that Marketing requires a special collection of features and settings, none of which are installed by default.

PowerPoint settings for broadcasting sales presentations, Excel add-ins for tracking travel expenses, Word mail merge templates, an Outlook profile that includes several e-mail accounts—it’s a zoo up there in Marketing. And when our IT tour guide discovered about halfway through his trek that Marketing also exchanges files with the Japanese office, he actually went back to desktop #1 with the Japanese language pack and started all over again.

Blunt force object . . .

“You and the orangutan,” I said when he dropped back into his office chair.

“Who are you calling a gorilla?” he asked. I waited a minute to see if he would actually pound his chest and huff at me.

“Different evolutionary branch. Orangutans are more intelligent. Almost human, except their hands and feet are interchangeable.”

“And your point is?”

“You might wish you were an orangutan when the first Office 2003 patch comes in.” Okay, then he huffed.

Guess he hadn’t heard the orangutan story. Not long ago, our local zoo built a new tropical rain forest exhibit for its orangutan family. It was an orangutan paradise. Fifty-foot rope swings, round-the-clock high humidity, all-you–can-eat fruit and very high fences. Orangutan instincts aren’t all that different from human instincts: the grass is always greener some place else.

The orangutans settled in like passengers on an economy cruise ship—noisy but not particularly discriminating. Except the big guy hiding in the corner. Nobody took any notice of him. Trouble was, he wasn’t shy; he was just biding his time. That night he found a wrench left behind by one of the carpenters and used it to pound the pins out of the hinges on the gate. Took them hours to round up the apes, fix the gate, and search the exhibit for any more hidden weapons of mass liberation.

. . . meets intelligent tools

My sympathies are with the orangutan. He came up with a very efficient plan. It hardly seems fair that he found himself right back where he started. But a guy with a window view ought to know better. Finesse. Using the right tool for the job. Getting it done with the lightest possible touch. I may not rate a window office, but here’s how I would have deployed Office 2003 to 350 desktops:

1. Copy the Office CD to a shared folder on the network. No administrative installation point, no Setup /a. Just a simple file copy, and every user in Marketing gets a permanent local installation source on his or her own computer. No more playing “Where’s the source CD?” when you install patches. (You can find out more about local caching here.)
2. Install Office on a clean test computer and use the Office Profile Wizard to grab all the custom settings you need in an OPS file.
3. Use the Custom Installation Wizard to set almost everything else in a transform (MST file), which will be applied at installation. Excel add-ins—done. Word templates—done. Outlook profile—done. Latest sales brochure stashed in the same location on every computer—done. Even the end-user license agreement (EULA) and product key (PIDKEY)—done.
4. Open the Setup.ini file, find the [MST] section, and point Setup to the transform you just created. And when someone calls at the last minute to announce that Marketing has to have Japanese language features, chain the Japanese language pack in the [ChainedInstall_1] section. You can find out more about chaining here.
5. Send a Setup command line to everyone in Marketing. Setup.exe automatically locates the Setup.ini file stored in the Files/Setup folder on the network share and installs Office and the chained applications with your customizations.

 Note   These deployment tools are all available for free through the Office 203 Resource Kit, but there is a catch: you must be deploying an enterprise edition of Office 2003. The tools do not work with retail editions purchased at your local computer store. If your organization acquired Office through a volume-license program, then you probably have an enterprise edition. You can find out more at Office 2003 Licensing and System Requirements.

The pinnacle of finesse just might be getting a job done without making any noise at all. If you add /qb- to the Setup command line and put the command line in a logon script, Setup will install Office automatically and silently—no huffing, puffing, or (you can only hope) irate phone calls.

So, if you want to know more about deploying Office without leaving your cage, click here.

“Hello, IT Primate House. Excuse me? . . . . Well, technically speaking, sir, a computer can’t be stupid; it isn’t human . . . .”

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About the author

The IT Shop Guy keeps all the Office users in your organization installed, up-to-date, and otherwise humming along with their Office applications. For obvious reasons, he prefers to remain anonymous, but the Office Resource Kit team sends all your comments his way, along with an unlimited supply of coffee. So feel free to bring your Office deployment questions and frustrations to his attention at feedork@microsoft.com.

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