Automate/Customize Office 2010 Installation

In case Office 2010 has not been deployed in your environment, this article may be quite useful. In our office, we wanted a way to deploy Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 through an automated batch file via logon script. This article is documentation of our setup - it also assumes you have purchased Microsoft Office 2010 through a Volume License Agreement or some other way.

Preparation
We wanted to deploy our installation from a mapped drive, so the first thing we had to do was copy the installation folder to the network, and assign the correct permissions to that folder. We chose to give Domain Users Execute access on the entire Office 2010 folder.

Customization
There is a plethora of customization options you can set in Office 2010 right out of the box. To access the customization tool you will want to navigate to the network folder (from a command prompt) and run the following command:

setup.exe /admin

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That should present you with the following menu:

The first time through, you will want to create a new customization file, but if you need to load this tool in the future, you will be able to load a customization file. As you will see after the product has been analyzed - there are quite a few options to changed. The most important one for us was the Licensing and User Interface section because we wanted a quiet installation:

The Configure Shortcuts menu is also very nice if you want to drop shortcuts in custom locations, or take shortcuts away. Finally, the Set Feature Installation States is helpful if you want to choose what to install - perhaps everyone doesn't need Publisher?

Once you are finished customizing, you will want to save the customization file in the Updates folder on your network where the Office 2010 deployment is located. Note: If anyone just double clicks on setup.exe from the root Office 2010 folder, the installation will automatically look in the Updates folder and apply the customization file if there is one.

Deployment
Like I said above, we wanted a quiet installation to be executed via logon script. We created the following batch file and saved it in the deployment folder on our network:

IF EXIST "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office2010Installed.txt" goto INSTALLED
                      
                      if exist "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office" GOTO COPYFLAG
                      mkdir "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office"
                      
                      :COPYFLAG
                      
                      copy \\SERVER\apps\Office2010\Office2010Installed.txt "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office2010Installed.txt"
                      
                      \\SERVER\apps\Office2010\setup.exe /adminfile \\SERVER\apps\Office2010\Updates\Office2010.msp
                      shutdown -r -t: 60 /c "Office 2010 Installation - Your PC will be rebooting in 60 seconds"
                      
                      :INSTALLED
                      
                      exit

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The most important section of code (this will specify which customization file to use and where it is located):

...setup.exe /adminfile \\SERVER\apps\Office2010\Updates\Office2010.msp

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We also wanted our batch file to reboot the PC after the installation was finished:

shutdown -r -t: 60 /c "Office 2010 Installation - Your PC will be rebooting in 60 seconds"

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Finally, just call this batch file in your logon script, have your users run it manually, or find some other way of executing your batch file and Office 2010 will deploy out to your PCs.

Deployment Note: I acknowledge there may be better choices for deploying software such as GPO and deployment through SCCM - vs a logon script. Either way, the customization documentation may help administrators looking to deploy office in some other way.

I hope this helps those looking to customize Office 2010!