Deploy Office 2008 via ARD

Deploying Microsoft Office 2008 via ARD to your company's Mac isn't much of a difficult task as it is tiresome. However, for Office 2008, Microsoft was a little bit nice in the sense that the installer is in package format.

Roughly, my deployment strategy was the following.

• Remove Office 2004.
• Remotely install Office 2008.
• Push out preference files.

And away we go...

Step 1: Remove Office 2004
We only want to remove Office 2004 applications. We're not necessarily concerned with wiping out their Entourage database or what other goodies they may have created. It's important that you don't delete their Microsoft User Data folder in their Documents folder because this folder contains their Identity that we're going to need to transfer to Office 2008.

With that said, we're only going to remove the Microsoft Office 2004 folder from the Applications directory. To do this, send this unix command to the target computers.
rm -r "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004"

Step 2: Install Office 2004
I won't go into the details on this step because its more on how to use ARD, but I will give you what you need to know.

Since the installer on the DVD is in .mpkg format, we can simply push this out through ARD. Use the install package option in ARD to do this.

Step 3: Set preferences
If you're not particularly concerned with making sure that your users have particular settings, then you can skip this step. If this is a concern, then we'll need to create preference files to push out to your target computers. One setting that may be of concern is saving in the new docx, xslx, or pptx file formats. This process isn't very difficult either.

Launch the Office 2008 application that you want to have special preferences. Open that application's preferences and make any changes that you need. We now need to find this preference file and make a copy of it.

The preference files can be found in ~/Library/Preferences/, where ~ is your home folder.

For Word, the preference file that you need is com.microsoft.Word.plist.
For Excel, the preference file that you need is com.microsoft.Excel.plist.
For Powerpoint, the preference file that you need is com.microsoft.Powerpoint.plist.

With your copy of preference files, set read and write permissions.. This will allow you to push this out to many computers without having to worry about the user being able to access that file. I don't think that giving full permissions to a preference file is really going to affect anything, as the user will be free to make changes to that file anyways.

Copy these modified preference files to the users Preference folder within their library.

Step 4: Transfering Identity
When the user logs in, their dock will still contain shortcuts to Office 2004 applications. The user will need trash their dock icons and recreate new icons for the new Office 2008 applications. When the user launches an Office 2008 application, they will have to run through a wizard to complete the setup. The wizard basically walks them through transferring their identity and entering their name.

Once the user has completed transferring their identity, they will be all set to go. Wasn't that better than running around with the install DVD and installing one by one?