Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

Unlike Microsoft Office 2003, Microsoft Office 2007 installation is very easy to customize. By customizing Microsoft office 2007 you will be able to avoid entering the product key every time you install the office suite , answer all setup questions during the installation, automatically remove previous office suites, customize office applications according to your needs etc.

If you have an office 2007 CD, you will need to copy the entire content of the CD to a folder on your local computer or a network share in order to save the changes. If you already have office 2007 in a folder on your computer or on the network, you are ready to go.

From your computer go to the RUN command and type the path to your office 2007 setup.exe file with the /admin command line at the end. For example: \\helpdeskgeek\Software\Microsoft\Office-2007\setup.exe\admin if your office files are on the network. The office customization tool should come up:

From here you can choose to create a new customization file, or open an existing one. Choose Create a new setup customization file for the following product and click on the OK button. 

Now you should be ready to start customizing your office 2007 installation. choose the default installation path and type the Organization name on the first screen.

Next, you have the option to add additional network resources. this is good if your original source is not very reliable:

Next, you will need to enter product key, and accept the license agreement.

Fom this window you can also choose the Display level you want when installing office. Yu have three options:

1. None
2. Basic
3. Full-Default

You can also check to have office installation wizard to give you a completion notice at the end, or No cancel. these options are good if you plan to install office through a batch file or logon script.

Next, specify the previous office applications you want the wizard to remove. if you plan to upgrade office 2007 from an earlier version, choose the Default setup behavior – early versions of installed programs are removed:

Next on the Add installations and run programs option, you can add any additional program you want to include in the office 2007 installation. I normally add the “PDF & XPS add-ins here, so you are able to save files on PDF or XPS format from any office application.

Next, you can specify office security settings. from here you can disable macros, VBA scripts etc.

Customize your security settings, otherwise leave it as default. Next, setup the properties for setup to apply during the installation:

Again, most likely you won’t need to modify these settings. Next, modify user settings.

There are so many tweaks you can do on the user settings option to make office 2007 applications behave according to your business need. I won’t talk about how to tweak these settings yet, that will be a topic for another post, for now I’m just glad to tell you  the options are there.

Next, set the features and installation state. From this option, you can customize the language packs, and tools you want to include on the installation. again tweak these settings according to your needs.

Next, Additional Content. On the Add files option, add any file that you want to attach to the setup.

Next, you have the option to remove files from users computers during the installation:

Next, you can setup any registry entry you might want to add to users computers during the installation:

Next, you have the option to remove any registry key from users computers:

Next, you have the option to configure shortcuts:

Next, setup the outlook profile. if you are upgrading from a previous office suite and want to keep existing profiles, but also want Outlook to automatically create a profile where there is none, choose Modify Profile – define changes to make to existing default profile. if default profile does not exist, Outlook creates a new one using your customization:

Next, specify the username and exchange server settings. because you will be using this installation on many computers, you should grab the username from the computer username variable %username% and then enter your organization Exchange Server name.

Choose weather you want your outlook users to have Cache Exchange Mode enable or not. if you click on More Settings you can also setup RPC over HTTP  and offline .OST and address book file locations.

Next, add more accounts if you need to:

Most likely you don’t need to add multiple accounts on one Outlook instance, unless you have a bunch of interns sharing the same computer! Next, remove accounts & export settings:

if you have computers on your network using another messaging system like Lotus, then you can specify to remove those accounts here. From this window you can export profile settings to a PRF file.

Next, specify send/receive groups:

From here you can specify the tasks outlook perform when the user click on the send/receive button on Outlook.

We are done with the customization. Now go to File and click on the Save Us button and save the file on the Updates folder inside the office 2007 installation files.

In this folder, you can also add all the updates you want to apply to office 2007 during the installation.

On the next post, I will show you how to automate the office 2007 installation using a logon script on a domain controller. till then.

This post was contributed by Nelson who is a computer network administrator and the writer of Track IT software blog.