This is a key decision point. Choosing Advanced options in Office 2003 and
earlier lets you use transforms to customize your Office deployments. A transform
is a special version of an .msi file—an .mst file—that modifies
the setup instructions of the original install package as it's installed and
is applied when you deploy a package using Group Policy Software Installation.
After the package is deployed, you can't go back and add the transform, so you
must add it at initial deployment.
You create transforms for Office 2003 by using the Custom Installation Wizard
in the Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit. You can create a transform
that controls which Office applications and options are installed, which folder
Office is installed in, which default options are set within each Office application,
and so on. You create a transform outside of GPE—using the Custom Installation
Wizard—so you should create the transform ahead of time, before you're
ready to deploy your Office package. After creating a transform file, you copy
it to the folder in which your Office setup files reside.
At this point in the package deployment, if you decide to use a transform,
you must choose the Advanced option instead of Assign to add the transform to
the deployment package. After choosing Advanced, make sure that the package
is shown as Assigned on the Deployment tab (it should be the only option for
a per-computer deployment), then select the Modifications tab, which Figure
2 shows, to add the transform file to the package. Click OK to complete
the package deployment.
That's all there is to performing a per-computer deployment of Office 2003.
After the computer reboots, the Office 2003 installation will commence and Office
will be installed when the user goes to log on to the computer. Now, let's look
at how Office 2007 changes this process.
Office 2007 Changes
In Office 2007, Microsoft has changed the deployment methods, especially with
respect to deployment via Group Policy Software Installation. Not all of these
changes are for the better, and I would say that if you're thinking about deploying
Office 2007 via Group Policy Software Installation, you should consider alternative
deployment options such as SMS. Here's what has changed:
- You no longer run an administrative setup to get the Office 2007 files to
your deployment server share; instead, you simply copy the contents of the
Office CD-ROM directly to the server share.
- Office 2007 no longer supports per-user deployments via Group Policy Software
Installation—only per-computer deployments.
- Office 2007 no longer supports transforms for customizing Office deployments.
A file called config. xml, which ships with the Office installation files,
supports a few customizations for use with Group Policy Software Installation—but
not nearly as many as you could perform with the Custom Installation Wizard
in the earlier versions of Office. Office 2007 does provide such granular
capability with the use of .msp files and the Office Customization Tool, but
these customizations aren't available during Group Policy Software Installation
deployment of Office 2007. With the config.xml file, however, you can customize
such things as the product key, the deployment location of Office on the target
computers, and the selection of Office applications or features that get installed.
I give an example of what one such config.xml file looks like in my blog post
at http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/gpoguy/archive/2007/01/29/
what-were-they-thinking-the-office-product-team-strikes-again.aspx. This config.
xml file should be customized prior to deploying Office via Group Policy Software
Installation, and you'll need to create a different Office installation share
for each config.xml file you wish to deploy.
- An Office 2007 installation using Group Policy Software Installation isn't
entirely unattended. After the initial installation of Office, users logging
on to their system for the first time could be confronted with an Office configuration
utility, which performs a set of post-deployment configurations and then logs
the user off to complete the tasks.
The bottom line with respect to Office 2007 deployments via Group Policy Software
Installation is that the features and capabilities available with Office 2003
and earlier are no longer supported. However, you might still find Group Policy
useful in customizing office 2007.
Using Group Policy to Customize Office
Following an Office installation, the next step is to control its configuration
on your users' desktops. Group Policy can also help you in that effort. Like
many other Microsoft applications and system components, all recent versions
of Office come with Administrative Templates that can be imported into GPOs
to customize Office configurations. The Office Administrative Templates ship
for each new version of Office. You can obtain them from the Microsoft download
site (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads). These .adm files ship with both per-computer
and per-user settings. However, it's important to note that these settings are
preferences, not policies; they will tattoo the target computer's registry until
you explicitly remove them. To add the Office 2007 .adm files to a GPO, follow
these simple steps:
- Open GPE and navigate to the GPO on which you want to set an Office Administrative
Template policy. Right-click the Administrative Templates node under either
Computer Configuration or User Configuration (it doesn't matter which) and
choose Add/Remove Templates.
- Navigate to the folder in which you've saved your Office 2007 .adm files
and select all the files in that folder. After they appear in the Add/Remove
Templates dialog box, as Figure 3
shows, select Close to load them into the GPO.
- The Administrative Templates will now appear in the Administrative Template
nodes in both Computer Configuration and User Configuration. If a setting
appears as both per-computer and per-user, the per-computer setting typically
takes precedence, unless otherwise stated in the Explain text for the policy
setting. If you're using Windows Vista to manage Group Policy, the new Office
templates will appear under the Classic Administrative Templates (ADM) node
rather than in the main tree. To view the preferences, you need to tell the
Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that you want to make them visible.
To do so, choose View, Filtering and clear the Only show policy settings
that can be fully managed check box. The Office templates will be visible
and ready to be set.
Note that some aspects of the Office template settings will differ from Administrative
Template settings. With many Administrative Template settings that Microsoft
provides, when you enable a policy for a particular application (e.g., Windows
Explorer), the setting that's controlled by that policy becomes grayed-out in
the UI. The end user can't even access the option to change the policy setting.
However, when you set an Office template (e.g., the default file save location
for Microsoft Excel), it appears that the end user can go in and modify that
option in Excel. But, the change made by the end user doesn't "stick," and the
option reverts back to the one that you delivered in your GPO. This is just
a subtle but important usability difference that you'll find in the Office templates.
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