Office Pro Plus: Setup Error - Files necessary to run the Office Customization Tool were not found. Run Setup from the installation point of a qualifying product.

That was the error we had when we ran setup /admin from our Office 2013 Pro Plus distribution point.

It turns out that we do need to download some additional files from Microsoft's download site.

• Office 2013 Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) and Office Customization Tool

We downloaded the 32-bit version of the tools and extracted them to a folder.

Once the extraction is complete copy the Admin folder to the root of the Office distribution point.

We could then run the setup /admin command from the distribution point and voila:

We can now go on and create our MST file to allow for automatic installation, activation, and base configuration of the products.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/

Windows Live Writer

Windows Phone 7 Killer Feature – SharePoint Integration with Office 2010

We had a few calls this morning with clients having problems with their machines due to Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

While working from a client location we sometimes need access to the audit notes that we keep on all of our clients. Those notes reside in a secure SharePoint Foundation site. It can take time to fire up the Tega v2 or the Tecra laptop to get into our SharePoint libraries.

Two feature discoveries were made this morning that made the payback on the HTC HD7’s purchase readily apparent.

1. SharePoint integration is seamless with the ability to pin the site to the Start Menu.
1. Quick access is really important when working on something critical.
2. Microsoft Office documents have quick access features like Outline View.
1. Tap the Outlook View button in Word after opening the document and navigate to the needed information quickly.

This is a screenshot of the Word 2010 Navigation Bar:

When the document is opened on the HD7 the Outline view looks just like that. We can then tap on the required heading and be brought to that point in the document just as we do within Word 2010.

This one feature set, that is the ability to quickly access a SharePoint site, open a Word document, and navigate to the needed information is going to save us a lot of time over the life of the phone. Payback on a risk is sweet! :)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Some Office 2010 Resources

A trial copy of Office 2010 is available for download.

• Evaluation Center: Download Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010
• Evaluation is for 60 days.
• Trial product must be uninstalled prior to installing RTM.
• Evaluation Version Release Notes.

The Office 2010 user guides are a good source for learning the product’s various abilities.

• Microsoft Download Center: Office 2010- Product Guides

We manage our client’s Microsoft Office deployments using Group Policy. To do so, we need to create and link a custom GPO and import the respective templates into that GPO.

• Microsoft Download Center: Office 2010 Administrative Templates and OCT

Since there are now two architecture based versions of Office, one for x86 (32bit) and amd64/x64 (64bit), we need to be mindful of any caveats to running the newly created 64bit version.

• Microsoft Download Center: 64-bit Client Installation of Office 2010
• MSDN: What is the difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010?

And finally, Microsoft has simplified the number of versions of Office down to three.

• Office 2010: Which suite is right for you?

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Further to Licensing Office in a Terminal Services Environment

Eric Ligman kindly wrote a follow-up e-mail asking about the scenario posted in our earlier post today on Licensing Microsoft Office in Terminal Services.

And the clarification made by Eric:

• Office is licensed per _device_ accessing the application no matter where the application is installed.

In the original post we had _desktop_

So, in the previously mentioned situation where we have 22 users total with 11 of them locally and 11 of them remote, we need to keep count of the number of _devices_ being used to access Office on the Terminal Server.

For example:

1. 22 users using Office.
1. 11 Office users on 11 local PCs (11 devices).
2. 11 users on 11 remote PCs into Terminal Services Office (11 devices).
3. Licenses required: 22.
• This is our original situation.
2. 22 users using Office in a shift work environment.
1. 22 Office users on 11 local PCs (11 devices) via 2 shifts
2. Licenses required: 11.
3. 22 users using Office on multiple PCs and laptops.
1. 11 Office users on 11 local PCs (11 devices).
2. 9 users on 9 remote PCs into Terminal Services (9 devices).
3. 2 users on 2 remote laptops into Terminal Services (2 devices).
4. Same 2 users on 2 remote PCs into Terminal Services (2 devices).
5. Licenses required: 24.
4. 22 users using Office on multiple PCs and laptops.
1. 11 Office users on 11 local PCs (11 devices).
2. 7 users on 7 remote PCs into Terminal Services (7 devices).
3. 4 users on 4 remote PCs into Terminal Services (4 devices).
4. Same 4 users on 4 remote laptops into Terminal Services (4 devices).
5. Licenses required: 26.

Thanks Eric for making sure that we were absolutely clear on how Office licensing works.

With that clarification we can be 100% confident that we will offer the correct answer to our clients when they ask about delivering Office to remote users via Terminal Services!

Eric’s original post:

• Answer to a question on how Microsoft Office is licensed in a Terminal Services environment and why OEM Office doesn’t cover it, in plain English

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Licensing Microsoft Office in Terminal Services

This post has an update here: Further to Licensing Office in a Terminal Services Environment.

This one is a bit of a brain buster to figure out, though Eric Ligman has done a great job of clarifying the way to properly license Microsoft Office in a Terminal Services environment:

• Answer to a question on how Microsoft Office is licensed in a Terminal Services environment and why OEM Office doesn’t cover it, in plain English

Essentially:

1. Office is licensed per _desktop_ _device_ accessing the application no matter where the application is installed.
2. Open Licensing provides the rights to run Office in a Terminal Services environment.

So, we have a client that we are setting up that has a combined total 22 users in their Active Directory with 11 physical machines on the network and 11 users connecting remotely via TS Gateway on SBS to their internal Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Terminal Server.

Office and their Line of Business application will be delivered via TS RemoteApps as well as Remote Desktop Services for certain users that require a desktop to work from.

All 11 systems will have Office and all 11 TS users will be accessing Office on the Terminal Server so we will be providing them with a sum total of 22 Open Value based licenses.

A couple of key Office Open Value part numbers:

• Office 2007/2010 Open Value 3 Year Agreement with 3 Payments
  • 021-07257: Office 2007/2010 Standard
  • 269-09046: Office 2007/2010 Professional Plus

The Microsoft License Advisor site:

• Microsoft License Advisor

There are three physical servers on this particular network with SBS 2008 Premium and Windows Server 2008 R2 being licensed with an Open Value Agreement.

UPDATE: Eric kindly e-mailed us with some clarifications based on our client situation mentioned in this post. His thoughts are developed with some examples in our post Further to Licensing Office in a Terminal Services Environment.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Outlook 2010 – Search Is Broken?

We just set up a new workstation with Office 2010 Professional Technical Preview installed on it.

The workstation is SBS 2003 integrated with Windows Vista Business SP2 as the base operating system.

This is what Outlook 2010 looks like when it fires up for the first time on a system with a rather large mailbox:

Be prepared to wait for that little window to run through all of the folders in Outlook before Outlook itself will open.

Now, once everything was installed, activated, and happy we left the workstation alone overnight to allow the Windows Indexing service the time it needs to cache all of that stuff.

The next morning, this is what we found:

We put in the name of one of our clients looking for a specific e-mail. And, we get:

Outlook Search

No matches found for “scott”.

Now, there should be lots of items found since we have no less that three client contacts that share that name as either their first or last name!

Manually sort our e-mail folder by name and we find:

Okay, so something is not hooking up in the search service.

When we look at the status of the Indexing service we see:

There are over 75,000 items seemingly indexed! That sure does not jibe with what is happening in Outlook though.

What we need to do is to reset the Index service so that whatever missing Outlook content gets re-indexed.

In Windows Vista or Windows 7 click Start –> Index [Enter].

Click the Advanced button and through the UAC.

Click the Restore Defaults button:

A warning will pop up:

Take note of any custom index locations in the initial Index service window as they will need to be added back after the reboot.

Click OK and reboot the system. After a couple of hours the Index service should have some positive results. It did in our case. 

UPDATE 2011-08-03: The proper procedure is:

1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. ALT --> Folder Options 
3. Search Tab
4. Restore Defaults
5. Reboot

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Installing Office 2010 Technical Preview x64

Office 2010 will now be in two architectural flavours: x86 32bit and x64 64bit.

What does that mean exactly?

Well, in the case of the Office 2010 Technical Preview, which is seemingly retail, it means this:

Setup Error

You cannot install the 64-bit version of Office 2010 because you have 32-bit Office products installed. These 32-bit products are not supported with 64-bit installations:

• Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007
• Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007

Hopefully the Open License version of the software that we will distribute via Group Policy will take care of the uninstalls properly.

More to come on Office 2010 . . .

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Outlook - inserting HTML code snippets into an email

Sometimes there is a need to insert some HTML code or scripting into an email for a signature or to send some externally resident content to someone.

To do this in the body of an email:

1. In Notepad paste the required code and save as an HTML file.
2. Open Outlook
3. Start a new email
4. Click on Insert
5. Find the HTML file that contains the needed code.
6. Click the down arrow beside the Insert button.
7. Click on "Insert as Text".


• 

  Insert as Text

8. The finished code rendering will show up:
• 
  

Note that Outlook 2007 no longer allows code snippets inserted into the signature. There are ways to get around this, but given the nature of many spam filters out there ... the risk of losing that email may be too high.

Outlook 2003 provides a "Use HTML as Template" option that we can insert into a signature though. Keep in mind that the email may never reach its destination as a result.

Tip source: SitePoint Forums: Inserting simple HTML into Outlook.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Office 2007 - Download Trial Versions

Need to try out Office 2007?

One need only go to the Office 2007 Try site and download a copy of the product needed.

Note that a Live ID is required. The site also requests registration information once you have logged in with your Live ID.

One can also download trial copies of the following Office 2007 products:

• Office Visio Standard & Professional 2007
• Office Live Groove 2007
• Office Project Standard & Professional 2007
• Office Publisher 2007
• Office SharePoint Designer 2007

The trial versions are good for 60 days from the date of the install.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Outlook 2007 - Stalled Send and Receive

This is what Outlook has looked like all day today:

Outlook 2007: Stalled Send/Receive

Nothing seems to have fixed the issue short of a reboot. Shutting Outlook down as well as killing its process in the Task Manager did not do it. Cancelling the Send/Receive and clicking on the S/R button or F9 on the keyboard does not always bring in new email either.

Given time constraints, a reboot has not been possible since the last one. We need to get some work done on this machine!

So, hopefully the reboot, when it happens, will fix it for now.

The machine that Outlook is misbehaving on is due for a significant component upgrade. So, the OS and all applications will be reinstalled to see if a start from OS Ground Zero will resolve the Outlook issues on it.

*Sigh*

UPDATE 2007-01-17: Tried ripping Office 2007 right out of the system and allowing our GP install to run fresh. Problem is still there after the reinstall.

There are a number of other workstations here that can connect to that Exchange profile with no issues. The one difference is the POP3 pulls that happen on the one workstation with the problem. Yet, the POP3 pulls are accomplished with no hang ups. Only the Exchange portion seems to get hung up indefinitely.

Service Pack 1 has been deployed via WSUS and all workstations have it installed.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Office 2007 - Config.xml Error - Whitespace is not allowed at this location.

For those of us with absolutely no HTML/XHTML/XML coding experience, we may run into a bit of a headache when setting up Office 2007 to install via Logon Script and Group Policy.

We may see this when proofing the Config.xml file located in the source file directory ..\OfficeVersion.WW\Config.xml:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and click the Refresh button, or try again later.

---

Whitespace is not allowed at this location. Error processing resource 'file ://mysbsserver/clientapps/office2007ent/...

Note the dotted line under the last line in the original image: ----------^

It is pointing to the space just after the actual cause of the problem.

What we need to remember is the file is coded in XML. Therefore, we need to follow XML coding rules when trying to insert special characters like the '&' ampersand in the above example.

Here is what the raw source code looks like:

Config.xml Source Code - Wrong

You can see that there is an actual '&' ampersand in the COMPANYNAME value.

A list of the codes needed for special characters like the '&' ampersand can be found here at Wikipedia: List of XML and HTML character entity references.

This is what the XML code should look like:

Config.xml Source Code - Correct

Note the "&" Ampersand+amp+Semicolon in the COMPANYNAME value. This code value will cause the XML to be rendered correctly.

Thus, after double clicking on the config.xml file, in IE you will see:

XML Correctly rendered in IE

For a complete explanation of the various settings in the config.xml file go here: TechNet: Config.xml in the 2007 Office system.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

SBS - Office 2003 Install Location After Domain Add

Ever hunt for something and not find it because it is not where it is "supposed: to be?

In this case, we are setting up a couple of Windows XP Pro Virtual Machines with Office 2003 Pro installed for some testing sessions that we will be doing.

The VMs are already resident on a Virtual SBS domain.

These particular XP VMs do not have Office deployed by GP or installed before being added to the domain. If they did, Office would be in its standard install location under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office.

So, when we ran the install routine for Office Pro, this is what we were greeted with for the directory install location:

C:\Program Files\Outlook

Having Outlook already installed by the SBS domain setup routine means the full version of Office installer picks the current location of Office Outlook: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Outlook.

In this case, we are leaving it at its default choice. Once the installation of Office was done:


So, on a day where we may have had five or six workstation installs where Office was not delivered via GP, we may miss changing the install location to \Microsoft Office on some of the machines that are already on the SBS domain.

In our experience, there is are caveats with changing default install location for applications such as issues with registry settings, subsequent uninstall needs, and other hiccups with product install or reinstall situations. This is not so common anymore, but still happens occasionally.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Office 2003 Service Pack 3 - Error 1402: MigrationDLLs Key Error

We have a stand-alone laptop that has bulked at the SP3 update for Office 2003 delivered via Microsoft Update or when the Service Pack was downloaded and an attempt to install was made from the download.

The error was a strange one:

Error 1402. Setup cannot open the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\Migration DLLs. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to access the registry or contact your computer manufacturer's product support for assistance.

The user that was logged on the system at the time of the update had local admin rights.

Opening Regedit and navigating to the requested key produced an access denied message while logged in as the user.

So, we logged off, and logged in again using the built-in Administrator account.

This enabled us to click on the key in Regedit and view its contents:


After right clicking on the key and clicking on Permissions, the "Group or User names:" window was blank.

After clicking the Add button, we added and gave full control to:

• Administrators
• Power Users
• Users

Click OK, Apply, and OK again.

User Permissions

Log off and log on again as the original user and run the update. One should see that the Service Pack installed correctly:


The closest KB article: KB 838687: You receive an error message when you install an Office program or open an Office program or document. The first bullet under Cause was applicable, with a combination of Method 1 and 4 being the correct way to fix it.

Note that WSUS based Office 2003 SP3 updates and stand-alone automatic Microsoft/Windows Updates that fail may be dealing with the same issue.

Also note that the domain admin account may be necessary if the local admin account also gets denied access to the key.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

DST - Relatively Smooth Sailing Here

Perhaps it is the symptom of managing relatively uniform, that is homogeneous, networks that facilitated a smooth transition across the board for our clients and us?

So far, other than the need to reboot some systems that did not update themselves automatically, the DST shift has been smooth!

All of our Mobile 5 based units were smooth, XP Pro, Office 200x, and client custom applications accepted the change with no issues.

We sent out a final warning letter last week to our clients to let them know that we may have difficulties. Then, on Sunday, after logging to some of the various SBS installations we manage to verify the DST shift went through, we sent out an e-mail to let our clients know to drop us a line if they were having difficulties.

The way I was reading blog posts, newsgroups, and others over the last couple of weeks, I though our phones would be ringing off the hook this morning. We did not receive one DST related call!

I do hope the same for all of you other SBSC and small I.T. Companies!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists