The Outlook: Customize Default Profile screen, which Figure 3 shows, lets you specify what happens to the user's default Outlook profile when you install the new version. As you see, you have four choices. If you choose to use the existing profile but none exists, Outlook will ask the user to create one the first time he or she launches Outlook. If you choose to modify the existing profile and no profile exists, Outlook will create a new one that includes your settings. If you choose to create a new profile with settings you supply, the new profile will become the default profile. You can also supply a profile (.prf) file that specifies your profile changes.
The next set of screens lets you supply Outlook settings that the CIW will apply if you choose Modify Profile or New Profile on the Customize Default Profile screen. Users can change their Outlook profiles only if they have administrative permissions, so be careful about which settings you change if your users won't be able to make their own changes later.
- The Specify Exchange Settings screen lets you specify an Exchange Server connection for the profile (including whether you want it to use the cached Exchange mode).
- The Add Accounts screen lets you expand the profile by adding one or more non-Messaging API (MAPI) accounts. For example, you can add an IMAP or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol--LDAP--account to the profile by specifying it here.
- The Remove Accounts and Export Settings screen lets you strip out cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail accounts from the profile and export the profile settings to a .prf file, which you can then customize and import to the transform.
- The Customize Default Settings screen lets you choose whether to use Outlook as the default email editor.
- The Specify Send/Receive Settings screen lets you customize Outlook's send/receive groups.
After you complete the Outlook screens, the Modify Setup Properties screen will list all the setup parameters that you included in the transform. Some parameters might not have assigned values, because any parameter that represents a default that you haven't overridden won't have an explicit value. You can modify any of the listed properties and add new properties from the Modify Setup Properties screen. Customizing the setup properties isn't for casual users, although Office setup will ignore any setting it doesn't recognize.
After you complete these steps, click Finish on the Save Settings screen to convert your settings to an .mst file. After the CIW writes the file, a summary page will give you the exact command that you need to type at the command prompt to run setup.exe and apply the transform. The transforms keyword specifies the transform's location. For example,
Setup.exe transforms="\\cycloneoffice\base-user.mst"
runs setup.exe using the base-user.mst transform. If you misspell transforms (which isn't case-sensitive) or leave out the equals sign or double quotes, setup.exe will run but will install Office using the default settings instead of the transform.
Other Deployment Tools
The CIW lets you easily apply a consistent set of initial settings to Office installations, and it's just one of the Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit deployment tools. Other useful resource kit tools include the Custom Maintenance Wizard, which lets you retroactively install or remove components or change their installation states; the Office Profile Wizard, which can capture all Office user settings and save them to a reusable, editable file; and Eraser, which lets you remove every trace of Office, including registry subkeys, components, and temporary files. You'll find documentation that explains exactly how these tools work and how to use them on the Office 2003 resource kit Web site.
