Office 2007, Unattended Setup & Fine-tuning, its very easy & simple!

March 14th, 2007

(updated to reflect final RTM version)

Unattending or silently installing MS Office System, has now become easier than ever.

1. Ensure you have an actual enterprise/corporate disc & product-key.
2. Notably, o2k7 uses setup patches (*.MSP) rather than transforms which previous versions used (*.MST). The below instructions will give you an MSP file, which is not accepted by non-corporate versions of o2k7. If you ignored point1 above, then you will end up wasting 15 minutes of your life which I’m not responsible for.
3. Now at the command prompt, type: setup.exe /admin
4. Choose the product for which you want to make a customization-patch.
5. Then go through all steps in the customization wizard (to install the reqd apps & remove junk & change default settings).
6. Be sure to have “completion notice” turned on & “suppress modals” turned off (this is to get to see errors, if any exist). Once you’re done with testing, go thru the customization again to modify the MSP to disable completion notice & enable suppress modals.
7. Save the resulting patch file in the same folder as o2k7 setup files.
8. Now just execute this command (thru any method) for silent install: setup.exe /adminfile CUSTOM.MSP
Or if you have the Office 2007 Enterprise VLK, you could even drop the CUSTOM.MSP file in the “Updates” folder & setup will pick it up automatically (without any switches being used).? For this, ensure you have WindowsInstaller 3.1 already installed.

Permissions on Mailbox Folders

March 13th, 2007

Grant Mailbox Rights

  1. Login to a machine with the account that you want to use to make the setting changes. This machine needs to have Outlook installed, and preferably the Exchange System Manager tools.
  2. Start ADMODIFY and select the users that you want to change.
  3. Click Next and choose the tab “Mailbox Rights”.
  4. The setting you want to change is “Add User to Mailbox Rights”, enter the username of the account you are using in the format domain\username and select the option “Full Mailbox Rights”.

Start Setperm

  1. Setperm needs to be run from a command line, initially connecting to a specific mailbox.
    Open a command prompt in the folder where you have extracted the setperm.exe utility.
  2. Start the application using the following command:setperm /Mailbox:alias\servername

    For example, if your mailbox is jsmith and the server is mail1 then you would enter:

    setperm /Mailbox:jsmith\mail1
    ?

  3. If you get an ActiveX error such as
    “Run-time error ‘429’:
    ActiveX component can’t create object ”
    Then you haven’t registered the dll file correctly – repeat and try again.
  4. Once you have brought up the box, adjust the permissions as required.
    Setting the permissions: Your best option is to set the “Reviewer” permission to your equivalent to “All Staff”. Then set higher permissions on an individual or group basis. Don’t use the default setting – choose “Custom” and then select the group.
  5. Select the mailboxes that you want to set these permissions on – you cannot use a group – but you can select all the mailboxes using the standard methods.
  6. Once satisfied, click “Set Permissions”.

The tool will now connect to each mailbox and set the permissions as required. Note that you can only do one set of permissions at a time – so if you want some users to have “Reviewer” and others to have higher permissions, you will need to run the tool again to set the alternative permissions.

Once the tool has finished, check the permissions are correct. You should then remove the rights to the mailbox that you granted to yourself.

Remove Mailbox Rights

You should remove the mailbox rights so that they are set as before. This is not only good practise from a security point of view, it also ensures that you do not come under suspicion of illicit mailbox access.

Repeat the process that you used to grant the mailbox rights. EXCEPT:

  • Do not select the account you are using – otherwise you will lock yourself out of the mailbox.
  • Select the option to remove the full mailbox rights.

Permissions on Mailbox Folders

Disable, Remove and Uninstall U3 Launchpad

March 13th, 2007

U3 Launchpad Removal Tool

NOTE: Your USB device should be plugged in, and U3 Launchpad running.