Customizing Microsoft Office 2007 installation

Customizing Microsoft Office 2007 installation

Microsoft Office 2007 setup allows you to customize the behavior of installation and gives complete control over. Once the setup is customized, you can straight away run setup.exe and whatever customizations you specified during customization will apply and it doesn’t require any further inputs.

Using customization, you can tell setup what to do the following.

1)      Pre pid CD Key

2)      Tell setup where to install (can be default location or custom location. Ex: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office)

3)      Enable or disable particular feature of MS Office

4)      Perform full or custom selected components installation.

5)      Modify existing Outlook profile, Create New profile etc.

Here I will show you how we can do that.

To customize Microsoft Office you need to click on Start Menu and click on Run. Type the following command to launch Microsoft Office with Office Customization Tool.

g:\Office2007\setup.exe /admin

g: is used as example and replace with drive letter and path where setup files exists.

Office Customization Tool is launched and asks to select one of the options. Select “Create a new Setup customization file for the following product”

The Welcome screen briefs what you can do with this tool.

Here you can set the path where to install MS Office and also allows you to key in Organization name:

The next screen asks to key in Product Key, License Agreement and Display level:

As a default behavior of setup, it removes all previous versions of office.

You can also customize Outlook and do following things as appears in the screenshot. You can create new profile or update existing profile.

You can specify Exchange server name. As you notice, for the User Name: you have to type it as “%UserName%”so posts installation, Outlook configures profile for every user who logs on to that system.

Once the customizations are completed, you need to save by clicking on File Menu and save.

Type the name as you wish and you need to save it in the following sub folder of Microsoft Office setup folder.

Microsoft Office setup folder\Updates. For example: D:\Office2007\Updates

The file will be saved as “.msp” extension.

That’s it we all set to go…. Now double click on “setup.exe” and setup runs smoothly without asking for any input.

You know what? You can also copy service packs, office updates and security patches so they will be automatically installs along with setup. You only need to copy them under “Updates” sub folder of Microsoft Office 2007 setup main folder.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and I believe it is very useful to you.