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Reporting on Office 2007 Customisation Settings

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So I don’t know about you but I have a very distinct love hate relationship with the Office 2007 Customisation Wizard. I just love the amount of tweaking I can do and I just hate the fact that I can tweak so much. In past I have found that tweaking as little as possible is often the best way forward. However sometimes you go on site and there is an Office Customisation file already setup – but its not quite doing what you or the deployment team expects.

So what now? Well in the past I have gone through each and every setting by hand writing down what is set and what’s not, compiling this into a report and then cross checking back with expected behaviour.

Not any more. I recently stumbled across a vbScript that will export the settings in the MSP to an XML file. This can then be viewed via a browser, imported into Excel or some other XML handling application. Now I can quickly review the settings inside each MCP, identify what has been changed and the value it has been changed to and remediate as required. I wish I had found this a few years ago!

The script and instructions for running it can be found here - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179027.aspx.

There is also good information here on how to use the individual OPA files for each part of the Office Suite to determine what the numeric values mean.

For example here you can see a section of the XML where I specify the company name, the license key and some Outlook configuration options.

<Install>

<AcceptLicense>true</AcceptLicense>

<CDKey>XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</CDKey>

<SourcePaths />

<CompanyName>Microsoft</CompanyName>

</Install>

<Outlook prf="CustomizationFile.F2288213.A8EB.4F37.BBFE.BCA2498927BB" customizationOption="3" modificationOption="0" newProfileName="Contoso eMail" modifyProfileName="" importPrfFilename="" configureExchangeServer="1" configureExchangeMailbox="1" selectedProfileOption="0" newMail="0">

<ExchangeSettings userName= %UserName%@contoso.com serverName="mail.contoso.com" account="Microsoft Exchange Server" overwrite="false" enableOffline="false" ost=" %USERPROFILE%\local settings\application data\microsoft\outlook\outlook.ost" oab=" %USERPROFILE%\local settings\application data\microsoft\outlook\ " localCopy="true" headersOnly="false" fullItemsOnly="true" downloadSharedNonMail="true" headersOnlySlow="true" downloadFldrFav="false" />

<RPCandHttpSettings configureOutlookAnywhere="false" />

</Outlook>

This post was contributed by Richard Trusson a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Services UK.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    October 14, 2009
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    October 16, 2009
    That's awesome information!  I wish I had known about that before, but that will definitely help me out in the future. But anyway, "customisation"?  It's a Z, not an S.  Seeing it spelled that way multiple times was painful.  Word 2007 even autocorrects it. ^_^