Deploying the MS Office 2007 Compatibility Pack

So I haven't really used this in a long time and thought I should really start trying to publish some of the solutions to I.T. related issues I've come up with.

So, you have a company full of computers running MS Office 2003 and you have no in place solution for rolling out software other than group policy (*sadness* which is less than useful in many cases). You want everyone to be able to deal with the new MS Office 2007 OOXML format. Hey look, they triggered it up so it won't be available on WSUS either. *lovely*

We could go to the bother of extracting and testing a group policy install, but you want to deploy it now and know right now if it was deployed or not, without everyone logging out, or any of the other wonderful issues GP brings along with it! Have no fear, Jason is here with your solution. All you need in addition to the update is the psexec utility and admin access to all the user machines.

Follow these steps:

1. 
   Extract the install and make available on a public share
   
FileFormatConverters.exe /extract:\\server\share\Office2k7Compat\extracted

   


2. 
   Check the contents of the \extracted directory:
   
   

   
   <DIR>      Catalog
   
   27,962,756 O12Conv.cab
   
   355,328    O12Conv.msi
   
   2,480      README.HTM
   
   
   
   3 File(s)  28,320,564 bytes
   
   

   
   
   


3. 
   Create this batch file "O2k7_Compat.bat" on your local machine
   
@ECHO off
cls

SET InstPath=\\server\share\Office2k7Compat\extracted

ECHO.Installing Office 2007 File Format Converter package...
msiexec.exe /i %InstPath%\O12Conv.msi /qn /promptrestart /log c:\O2k7Compat.log
ECHO.Done!

   Note: we will be running this file non-interactively, so the ECHO lines are mostly spurious. However, if you have issues with the network you can use the same file to install manually without having to click through a dumb install wizard.
   


4. 
   Obtain the psexec utility which is part of the pstools package from
   
   This Technet page.
   


5. 
   Run psexec like this from the directory where you've saved your O2k7_Compat.bat file to install the compatibility pack on one machine. Obviously, psexec.exe must be in your %PATH%.
   
psexec \\machineName -u yourDomain\administrator -i -c O2k7_Compat.bat

   Tip: investigate the "@computerlist.txt" option to psexec to have it iterate over all your client machines in one go.
   


6. 
   If you get a non-zero return from the install, then check out the log on the machine that failed. It'll be at \\machineName\c$\O2k7Compat.log
   

Problem solved!