I think almost everybody who tried to make an unattended deployment of Office 2007 experienced some problems. Unless you use switches or make all the necessary customization settings in Office Customization Tool (OCT), your “silent” installation will fail without giving you much details in SCCM/Office log files. This is happening because Office 2007 installation not being setup properly to run silently, requiring no user interaction at all.

Only today, one Senior Support Engineer from Microsoft, wrote about this in “clear text” (I don’t like the word “officially”…). If he posted this earlier, I could sleep two hours more in the night I customized OCT for the first time.

So here is his tip on how to create a customized MSP file with OCT:

1. Go to the original package source that contains the Office 2007 setup files
2. From the directory that contains the Office 2007 setup files, run setup.exe /admin. This should open the Office Customization Toolkit (OCT)
3. Select to Create a new Setup customization file
4. In the “Install location and organization name”, set the default installation location and organization name.
5. Click on Licensing and user interface. Make sure you enter a valid product key, check the EULA checkbox and set Display level to None. Completion notice checkbox should not be checked and Suppress modal should be checked.
6. Save the MSP file by going to File --> Save. Give the file a name and save it to the Updates folder located in the Office 2007 installation source folder. By saving it to the Updates folder, the /adminfile switch will not need to be used as part of setup.exe. If the file is not saved to the Updates folder, make sure that the /adminfile switch is used as part of setup.exe and that it points to the MSP file just created.

Further more, with OCT you can customize almost everything regarding how your Word/Excel etc. applications will run. What I liked most is the possibility to create the default profile in Outlook if you are using an Exchange server in your organization.

Don’t forget to save the MSP file and to put the file in Updates folder or to use /adminfile <path to MST file> switch .