Vat of Knowledge

Just got my hands on Office 2010 here the other day on my MSDN account, still in beta.  Probably been there a while, but I just got it anyway…  So I just want to jot down how to make updates to both Office 2007 as well as 2010, to customize your setup, embed your volume license MAK key, set installation options, etc.

Extract

To begin with, Office 2010 came as an executable file download.  We first need to extract the contents properly and copy that to a network share.  If you have the Office 2007 ISO, CD or DVD, you can just copy all the files.  The main thing is that the folder structure is intact.  In the case of the 2010 executable, go to a command prompt, and type in the following to extract the content properly:

en_office_professional_plus_2010_beta_x86_x16-19227.exe /extract:c:\Office2010

This will extract the contents including all folders to c:\Office2010 and look something like:

Office Customization Tool

Now copy all these files to your network share.  Either from the run dialog or command prompt, execute setup /admin.  So for share at \\server\share\Office2010, type the following:

\\server\share\Office2010\setup /admin

This will launch the Customization Tool.  From here you can enter info such as your company name, product key, and you can choose to make a silent installer or a basic installer which asks the end user no questions, but shows progress.  Here are some screens of the OCT:

To get started, create a new MSP:

As you can see from that last screenshot, I chose Basic mode, and suppress modal.  Choosing this bypassing any questions, but be careful, because this will automatically reboot you if the system needs rebooting, such as an upgrade.

Slipstreaming a Service Pack

So Office 2007 is up to Service Pack 2 (click to download).  Next, download all the updates beyond the service pack.  You can download these updates at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/CD100602001033.aspx.  As you can see there a a number of downloads.  The best thing to do is to install a copy of Office 2007 with SP2, then run Microsoft Update to see what updates are necessary, then only download the ones you need.  Put all the downloads in a temp folder for now, let’s say c:\OfficeUpdates.  Finally we need to extract the updates into the base directory you have on your server share.  For service pack 2, do the following:

c:\OfficeUpdates\office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:”\\server\share\Office2010\Updates”

You might find it easier to map a drive letter to the server share for this as well.  For the updates beyond SP2, copy this into a script and run it to automatically extract all updates.  All updates need to be in the same folder for this to work:

for %g in (D:\OfficeUpdates\*.exe) do %g /extract:”\\server\share\Office2010\Updates” /quiet

Or you can run the extract process on each one individually.  This will extract the update into an MSP file in the Updates folder and apply it when you run setup.exe.

D:\Office2007-Temp-Updates\office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:”D:\Office2007\Updates”D:\Office2007-Temp-Updates\office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:”D:\Office2007\Updates”