March 2005

From the desk of the Office IT Shop Guy

In some future utopia, IT pros will execute flawless deployments of Office by voice command alone. They’ll say "Software, install" and it'll just happen. Meanwhile back in the real world, IT pros sometimes make mistakes (believe it or not) when deploying Office. Fortunately, there is a tool to get you quietly back on track.

Applies to
Office 2003

Case in point. Today the IT Shop has been flooded with calls from users claiming that a phantom has taken up residence in their computers. Even as they speak, screens are blinking on and off, files are opening and closing by themselves, and words are appearing out of nowhere on the screen. It's not even lunch time, and every user on the third floor is suffering from the same collective delusion.

"Third floor—isn't that Customer Service?" asks my pal in the next cubicle.

"Yeah."

"People talking to customers all day on those headset things."

"How can they be talking to customers when they're all calling me?"

"My point is, they're talking nonstop on the phones to somebody."

"What, you think aliens are getting in through the phone lines?" I am half-serious.

"Didn't you just finish rolling out Office 2003 up there?"

"Yeah."

"You do know about the new speech recognition feature in Office 2003."

"Sure."

"If the mike is sensitive enough, sometimes even breathing hard . . . ."

The art of meaningful conversation . . .

Of course I knew about the speech recognition feature. I had shoved on a headset and played with Speech when I should have been configuring the new installation for the third floor. "Voice command. File. Open." It was incredible. When is the last time somebody—anybody—did precisely what you asked exactly when you asked? "Voice command. File. Save." Ordinary conversations pale in comparison. Before I knew it, the entire afternoon was gone—talked away.

Eventually I glanced at the clock, dropped abruptly back down to earth, and got to work deploying Office. In the interest of making up time, I started the Custom Installation Wizard, dropped in the OPS file with all my custom settings, set the entire feature tree to Run All From My Computer, and turned off the handful of features I didn't want. This would have been an excellent plan had I remembered to turn off Speech. (I have never claimed to be infallible.)

Which is how the speech recognition feature—in voice command mode—found its way onto every computer in Customer Service. And every time a Customer Service rep on the third floor opened his or her mouth—and I fully admit that if anybody in the world has the right to talk, they do—Office dutifully tried to carry out the apparent command. "Good morning, how may I help you" turned into a nightmare of applications running, files opening, and computers shutting down apparently at random. That is the problem with computers: they aren't like people. Once you set them up and turn them on, they are completely committed. They never resort to sarcasm, and they don't conveniently forget to do what you told them to do just because it doesn't make any sense.

"You're gonna have to uninstall and start over."

"Yeah."

"The entire third floor."

"Right."

"Call home now, buddy, and hope you get your answering machine."

. . . is knowing when to keep quiet

Well, we all know that hard work never killed anybody. But why risk it? Tools are what separate people from, well, other people. Tools in this case meaning the Custom Maintenance Wizard. You see, except for that one minor glitch ("minor" meaning insignificant compared to the Black Death or a world war), there was absolutely nothing wrong with my Office 2003 installation. As a matter of fact, except for that one minor glitch, it had gone like clockwork.

So after everyone else left for the day and the IT Shop was blessedly silent, I fired up the Custom Maintenance Wizard, pointed it to the original Office MSI file, and clicked my way to the page called Set Feature Installation States. I set the speech recognition feature to Not Available, Hidden, Locked and clicked Finish to save the CMW file. Then I wrote a quick logon script to run the wizard silently on every user's machine the next morning, and I was finished. Made it home in time to watch the evening news, which made my IT Shop woes look almost trivial by comparison.

The next morning, everyone in Customer Service logged on to the network first thing. They were all uncharacteristically quiet. The Custom Maintenance Wizard ran on all their machines and slapped down my CMW file before the first phone call. Before long, Office 2003 and the Customer Service Department were working exactly the way they are supposed to. "Good morning, how may I help you" meant just that -- no more and no less. The phones rang, customers were satisfied, and I was a martyr to the cause.

"You must have been here all night!" said the Director of Customer Service. I—unlike most of my fellow human beings—know when to keep my mouth shut. (You are more than welcome to learn from my example – just click here.)

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.