Building a Customized MS Office 2007 Install CD
Over the past month I’ve done 3 or 4 installations of Microsoft Office 2007 on different machines and have become increasingly frustrated with all of the tedious, manual steps that are required:
- Enter 25-digit product key
- De-select all of the various applications and options that I don’t want installed
- Use Microsoft Update to download/install Office Service Pack 2
- Configure Outlook with my employer’s Exchange Server information
I’ve gone through this so many times now that I’m pretty good at doing it quickly but there is still a lot of clicking and waiting for the next prompt. I finally decided to see what it takes to automate this whole process. Turns out that it’s pretty simple.
Copy CD to Hard Disk
The customization process requires that a bunch of files be added to the MS Office installation CD. I copied the entire contents of my existing MS Office CD to my hard disk – this will serve as the starting point of my new disc image.
Run Office Customization Tool
From the copy of the installation disc that you just created, open a command prompt and run the following:
setup.exe /admin
This will launch the Office Customization Tool which allows you to specify answers to all of the prompts that you see as part of a typical Office installation.
There are a lot of options that you can specify with the customization tool, but I’ll just walk you through the few that I’ve used for my custom install.
On the “Licensing and user interface” screen, I specified my product key and checked the box acknowledging that I’ve accepted the terms of the license agreement. Additionally, I changed the display level to “Basic” which means that I want to see the welcome screen and installation progress bar, but don’t want to be prompted for any installation options.
On the “Set feature installations states” screen is where I select which productions/options I want installed. I typically don’t install Access, Publisher or InfoPath and skip most of the Office Tools and Shared Features options. I suspect that most people simply go with the default installation options, but I’m pretty anal about installing only those parts of Office that I actually use.
On the “Outlook profile” screen, I’ve selected the “Modify Profile” radio button to indicate that I’d like a new Outlook profile to be created at installation time.
On the “Specify Exchange Server settings” screen I’ve provided my user name as well as the hostname of my Exchange server. If you click the “More Settings…” button you can set-up Exchange proxy settings and all of the other options that you’d typically see when running Outlook for the first time.
Once you’ve completed all of your customizations, you can select File –> Save to save your newly-created .msp file. It doesn’t matter what you name the file (I called mine BDCustomizations.msp) but you’ll want to save the file to the \Updates directory that you copied from the original installation media. When the setup program is executed it knows to look in this \Updates directory and apply all of the .msp files that it finds there.
Download and Extract SP2
By copying the .msp files for the Office Service Pack 2 to the \Updates directory we can have the setup program apply SP2 at the same time that it applies our other customizations. To get the SP2 .msp files you simply need to download the stand-alone SP2 installer and use the following command:
office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:c:\Office2007\Updates
Obviously, you’ll need to alter the path specified after the /extract: flag to point to the actual location of your \Updates directory.
You can use this same /extract: flag with most of the Office updates and add-ins. I install the “Save as PDF or XPS” add-in in the same way.
Burn Updated Installation Image Back to DVD
Once you’ve completed the steps above, you should find that your \Updates directory now looks something like this.
Burning to disc is actually optional – you could take your installation directory structure and copy it off to a network share at this point and it would work just fine. In my case, I wanted to burn the new image back to an optical disc. With all of the SP2 files included, the image no longer fits on a CD so I burned it to a DVD instead.
There are no special requirements for this step – simply use your program-of-choice to burn all of the installation files (everything you copied off of the original disc plus all the new additions to the \Updates folder) to a blank disc.
The next time that you need to do an Office 2007 installation, simply insert your disc, and run setup.exe – all of your customizations, updates and add-ins will be automatically applied.
4 Responses to “Building a Customized MS Office 2007 Install CD”
Brian – great post – does this only work with the Enterprise version of Office 2007? Haven’t seen you post in awhile – too many projects? Take care!
John
John, I haven’t tested it myself, but I’m fairly certain that this will work with any version of Office. Guess I need to test it with Office 2010 now.
Thanks for this great writeup – I work with John and he sent me this link. I just used OCT to create a great, fast installer for our company (it just finished installing on one computer, and the other’s at 80%).
Roger, I’m glad you found the instructions useful. It’s always nice to hear that someone actually found this helpful.
Brian
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