by Ivan Tchoubenko
I recently ran into a ‘funny’ situation- one of the clients’ CEO asked to upgrade to Office 2007. Despite all the compatibility warnings, he insisted on having it installed. I quickly configured the ‘Save As type’ to default to office 97-2003 format (.doc and .xls). I didn’t manage to create a domain group policy which would force everything to be saved in office 2003 format. The user also swore to double-check all files to make sure that everything is saved in the correct format.
To my great surprise the next morning I received a request for help from a user that received an e-mail attachment with a very important excel spreadsheet and could not open it up because it asked for a office format converter. The same document ended up in seven users’ outlook inboxes. So I had to install the Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System seven times that morning. The next day it got worse! Now an additional twenty something people requested the same installation procedure.
I had to do something and I had to do it fast! I have implemented WSUS 3.0, but it doesn’t have the feature to deploy the Office Compatibility Pack yet. So I ended up doing it the old traditional way: Domain Software Installation Policy!
Below are the few steps I took to resolve the issue.
After I downloaded the FileFormatConverters.exe from Microsoft.com/downloads, I had to make the .exe format into the .msi required for the Software Installation Policy. There are two ways to proceed here. One is to extract the files using an archive app such as 7-zip, or WinRar. The second is to use the /extract command. I typed the command below in the Run:
C:DownloadsFileFormatConverters.exe /extract:C:TEMP
Where the left part before /extract is the location of the FileFormatConverters.exe and the right part is the destination where the extracted files should be saved to.
Using the second procedure, Microsoft Software License Terms prompt showed up. I clicked Continue and a second later the second prompt notified me that 4 files were successfully extracted.
I only needed two files for the policy to work: the O12Conv.cab and the O12conv.msi.
I saved those two files in a network share where everyone has the ‘modify’ permissions.
The next part was simple.
I accessed the Group Policy Management Snap-in and created a new policy called OfficeFileFormatConverter. I went to Computer Configuration-> Software Setting-> Software Installation-> Package
I specified the location of the O12Conv.msi in the network share and made the installation ‘Assigned’. (The default for Computer Configuration Policies) And that was it! The installation details immediately appeared in the right-pane window. I didn’t have to change or configure any other settings.
I enabled and linked the policy to the necessary OU Computer containers.
Next, I used the gpupdate /force command for the users that needed the converter that day. By the next morning the policy has propagated itself across the domain. The remaining users started their laptops and saw a message in the startup screen saying that the Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System is installing.
The installation was quick and painless!
