This weeks post is the part two to the Your Building a LiteTouch Bootable USB Image Questions Answered! post from 6/21. Big thanks to Jeremy Chapman from the Windows Product Team and Brian Shiers from the Microsoft Office team for the assist.

Over the last couple of weeks at TechEd and from folks who participated in the Bus Tour, we were consistently getting the same question, “How do I add Office 2010 Professional Plus to my MDT 2010 Update 1 Beta environment?” The good news is that most of it is documented in the help files of MDT 2010. With this MDT release adding Office 2010 support, however, there is little additional documentation explaining the differences compared to Office 2007. The description below is actually derived straight from the MDT help files, but I added a few screenshots and go to explain the “Office Products” tab that lights up in MDT once you add Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 to the Deployment Workbench. MDT provides you access to leverage the Office customization features in a single deployment console.

The first step is to get MDT 2010 Update 1 Beta from Microsoft Connect. If the link doesn’t work for you, you may need to create an account first. MDT 2010 Update 1 is in the “Solution Accelerators” program. There is a “Security Solution Accelerators” program, too, with great content, but don’t confuse it like I did the first time for the “Solution Accelerators” one. Once you are in there, you can download MDT 2010 Update 1 in both x64 and x86 versions, or print-ready documentation here.

This is what you’ll find about importing applications in the help files of the Deployment Workbench (minus screenshots):

MDT 2010 allows you to use the New Application Wizard in the Deployment Workbench to create new applications that are deployed from the deployment share. The New Application Wizard copies source files for this type of applications to the deployment share.

To create a new application that is deployed from the deployment share

  1. Click Start, and then point to All Programs. Point to Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and then click Deployment Workbench.
  2. In the Deployment Workbench console tree, go to Deployment Workbench/Deployment Shares/deployment_share/Applications (where deployment_share is the name of the deployment share to which the application will be added).
  3. In the Actions pane, click New Application.
  4. The New Application Wizard starts.
  5. Complete the New Application Wizard.

Information for Completing the New Application Wizard

On this wizard page

Do this

Application Type

Click Application with source files, and then click Next.

NewApp

Details
  1. In Publisher, type publisher_name (where publisher_name is the name of the application’s publisher).
  2. In Application Name, type application_name (where application_name is the descriptive name of the application).
  3. In Version, type version (where version is the version of the application).
  4. In Language, type language (where language is the language of the application).
  5. Click Next.

NewAppDetails

Source
  1. In Source directory, type source_folder (where source_folder is the fully qualified path to the folder containing the application source files).
  2. Note: Alternatively, click Browse to find the source folder.
  3. Select or clear the Move the files to the deployment share instead of copying them check box based on your requirements, and then click Next.
  4. This check box determines whether the wizard copies or moves the application source files to the deployment share. If the check box is:
  5. Selected, the wizard moves the source files to the deployment share.
  6. Cleared, the wizard copies the source files to the deployment share.
  7. Note: By default, this check box is cleared.

NewAppSource

Destination

In Specify the name of the directory that should be created, type destination_folder (where destination_folder is the name of the folder in the deployment share that will contain the application source files), and then click Next.

NewAppDescription

Command Details
  1. In Command line, type command_line (where command_line is the command line to be run to start the installation of the application, including any command-line parameters). Note: for Microsoft Office this is simply “setup.exe” as shown below for basic installations using pre-configured Office MSP files. Advanced installation might require you to define the adminfile to apply during installation
  2. In Working directory, type working_directory (where working_directory is the fully qualified or relative path for the folder designated as the working directory for the application).
  3. Click Next.

NewAppCMD

Summary

Click Next.

Confirmation

Tip   Click Save Output to save the output of the wizard to a file, or click View Script to view the Windows PowerShell scripts used to perform the wizard tasks.

Click Finish.

The New Application Wizard finishes. The application is added to the list of applications in the details pane in the Deployment Workbench.

Now that Office 2010 is imported, you can do a few things specific to Office 2007 and 2010 – these items are not called out specifically as Office 2010 items in the help files of the Deployment Workbench. After Office has been imported into Deployment Workbench, then right-click the application and click properties:

ApplicationProperties

Now click on the “Office Products” tab and you will see this:

OfficeProducts


If you select “ProPlus” from the drop down menu called “Office product to install”, it will enable the fields below:

OfficeProductsPopulated

Note the Office product to install is based on the source files you have initially provided in the setup of the application in MDT. ProPlus and Standard are the 2 volume license skus you typically see available here depending on the source

The Office Products tab is essentially a graphical user interface to adjust settings in the Office config.xml file. Here you see the display level for the installation window, you can set according to your preference (I prefer none, meaning Office will install invisibly with no progress screen, but that is up to you), choose languages (they will match the OS language by default, otherwise English), accept the EULA automatically so it doesn’t interrupt the automated process and suppress reboot.

Many of these settings plus many more can be controlled with the Office Customization Tool (OCT), you can see the full list of OCT configuration options here. MDT provides you direct access to invoke the OCT. You can use the OCT to customize which components and features of Office are configured upon installation. You can create role specific MSP packages to customize your application to meet your specific user group needs. For example, I can give Finance roles Excel, PowerPoint and Word, marketing roles just PowerPoint and Word, and sales roles Access, PowerPoint and Word. The MSP files you generate are automatically stored in the Updates folder of the Office source directory.

OfficeProductsSaveMSP

Office also automatically installs items in the Updates folder in its source directory, so in the future you can simply drop the update files into that location and they will install automatically with Office for each new MDT-based installation. If you create more than one MSP file for multiple roles, you would normally store them in a different location and use admin files to determine which MSP is applied to each installation.

The Office Customization Tool also lets you dictate the type of activation (Key Management Service [KMS] or a Multiple Activation Key [MAK]), the Product Key field from the Office Products tab can be used for a MAK key, but it is not obfuscated in the deployment control files and could be discovered easily if media-based deployment materials are lost or stolen. KMS is the recommended activation approach for medium-to-large organizations (same for Windows activation, too), learn more about Office 2010 activation here.

OCTKMS

An optional area to look at if you are using Office Communicator or Live Meeting, you can set application dependencies in MDT to require for example that Office 2010 is installed prior to those applications being installed.

OfficeDependencies1

Above, I have just right-clicked on an Office Communicator application, opened Properties, then the Dependencies tab. If I click Add, I will see a list of applications in my application store and can select Office 2010 from the list. This means that if you select to install Office Communicator without selecting Office 2010, it will select it for you. Another option is to use an application bundle to group all related Office Products in the correct installation sequence. That will mean that you will only see one entry in the application selection list in the Lite Touch Installation wizards at install time. You can even use these approaches for Office add-ins and other related applications – they just need a silent install command.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, you should have a working and automated build. This should hopefully get you started with Office 2010 integration in your MDT environments. There is always more you can customize and configure and more in the Office and MDT documentation I’m not covering.

If you are working with MDT or any of the deployment tools and have questions or suggestions for content that you just cannot find in the documentation, let us know and we will try to answer the more popular ones with posts like these.