Deploying Office 2007 applications with configuration Manager

These notes are at least partly for my own good because I always forget the settings between Office deployment projects. The screenshots are actually taken from Project 2007 standard which uses the same installation engine as the Office 2007 suite and other Office 2007 products like Visio, OneNote etc.

So the first thing to do with your Office 2007 deployment is create an .msp. You can do that by running the Office setup.exe with the /admin switch (setup.exe /admin).

When configuring the .msp you will need to pay particular attention to the Licensing and User Interface tab as well as the Modify Setup Properties tab.





On the Licensing and User Interface tab you should check the no cancel and suppress modal boxes. Leave the completion box unchecked as you do not want a "I'm done" box popping up behind the scenes and causing your installation to time-out.


On the Modify Setup Properties tab, its important to create a SETUP_REBOOT property. Depending on how I am deploying the application (in task sequence with restart controlled by task sequence, in program with restart by SMS or controlled by application) I like to set this either to Never or AutoIfNeeded. The default is baaaadd, as it causes a pop-up asking for a restart upon completion of the application installation. For more options and properties available check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179018.aspx.

Finally save your .msp in the updates folder. Name it so that it is first alphanumerically before service packs and other .msps that may be put in the updates folder. A date as the name may help you with change control. With the .msp in the updates folder you don't have to run setup.exe with any switches to it to install unattended. Make sure you working directory is the same as the directory setup.exe is in or the updates folder won't be found. This is configured by default, but I had at least one customer run setup.exe from a folder above (.\project2007std\setup.exe) and the setup could not find the .msp.

Hope this helps with your Office 2007 application deployments!

Deploying Autodesk Inventor 2009 with Configuration Manager 2007

I had the pleasure of working with a customer this week to prepare some Cad applications for distribution with Configuration Manager. On the list was Inventor from Autodesk.



So the Inventor suite consists of 5 applications and 7 prerequisites. Autodesk provides a tool that generates a giant .ini and wrapper setup.exe to deploy these applications and prerequisites for you. We did actually try to run this in the task sequence, but found the setup.exe spawns another setup.exe process and then exits with a non-zero exit code of 103. The applications installed, but the web reporting showed a failure. Not very good for deploying as you would never know which systems really failed and which were successful.



I love task sequences with Configuration Manager so it didn't take much for us to decide to deploy the Inventor by using task sequences. The coolest thing about task sequences is the ability to determine which task item caused a failure via web reporting. It makes tracking your software deployments much easier to determine root cause of failures.



We first created a giant package of the Autodesk created folder containing all the applications, prerequisites, setup and .ini. After reviewing the .ini generated by Autodesk we were able to determine the applications and prerequisites. We then just created task sequence items for each application and prerequisite (except the MSI update).



This worked great with 2 exceptions:

1. Thje Inventor MSI itself insisted on being run from the autodesk setup. It would error out when we attempted to run the MSI directly. To resolve this we installed Microsoft ORCA and opened up the Inventor MSI. We located Launch Conditions and then deleted the row with the condition that the MSI be launched by the setup.


2. One of the prerequisite applications (Microsoft WSE 3.0) had spaces in the MSI name. We had been using the Run Command Line task item so we didn't need to create a SMS-style program for each task item (too much work). However we couldn't run the MSI with spaces in the name with the Run Command line, so in this case we did create one SMS style program and just ran it.

The actual task sequence is posted up on http://www.systemcentertools.com/otherutils.html !