Office 2008 Installer, InstaDMG compatible

[pepijn]

I guess that explains it then, one more self-contained update to switch to a pkg-based model. As mentioned, there’s tools available to wrap up the contents of this last pre-PKG updater into its own .pkg for inclusion in the InstaDMG build train, in my case I’ll probably use the logGen/pkgGen/Packagemaker trifecta.

Cheers,

Pepijn

[Patrick Fergus]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: patchsmyle[/u]
> I see now. I had not glanced at the file format and only looked at contents missing that the package was a
> VISE installer.
>
> So, this means you would need to wrap your own package. I cannot wrap one and share it without
> stepping on copy-write distribution…[/QUOTE]

Yeah–you can’t distribute the package yourself, but if you had [i]instructions[/i] on creating the package I’m sure many on the InstaDMG forums would appreciate them. No rules against posting those.

– Patrick

[zanzan42]

Since we have an enterprise license, a typical installation of Office doesn’t prompt me for a product key. The key is already embedded somewhere in the installer we get from Microsoft.

I wanted to try and track down what mechanism in the Office installer controlled that, and figure out how to tweak it for use with InstaDMG without having to create a second package to drop in the setupinfo.plist.

It turns out that the SetupInfo.plist file is contained in ProductKey.bundle in the installer. The path is:

Office\ Installer.mpkg/Contents/PlugIns/ProductKey.bundle/Contents/Resources/Office/SetupInfo.plist

I don’t have a retail Office installer to look at, but I’m going to guess that it does not contain the /Office/SetupInfo.plist part of the path above. The only item inside the Office folder is the SetupInfo.plist file.

I really don’t want to completely remove the stuff in Plugins, as was recommended earlier in the thread, since I really only want to throw out the stuff that gets in the way of installing using InstaDMG. In addition, I’d need to track down what is controlling the installer and try to modify it such that the only thing it’s calling is ProductKey.bundle.

The file located at:

Office\ Installer.mpkg/Contents/PlugIns/InstallerSections.plist

contains a number of sections which appear to be the order in which the installer calls its functions: License, ReadMe, Target, Package Selection, etc, including ProductKey.bundle. I’ve removed all the sections except for ProductKey.bundle to see what happens.

At the end of the day, if we can come up with a method to simply modify the existing installer to add SetupInfo.plist in the right place and then remove the extraneous installer sections, we’re golden.

I’ll send an update with my testing results when I have them (or as soon afterward as possible, as I’m in Egypt right now and engaged in other things).

Allan

[zanzan42]

My test was successful.

I actually left both ProductKey.bundle and RemoveOffice.bundle in the InstallerSections.plist. I’m not exactly sure what the RemoveOffice.bundle does yet, or whether it’s something I should remove from the InstallerSections.plist, but it didn’t adversely affect the install. I suspect it either installs the Office Uninstaller, or is what gets called if you choose Uninstall Office when in the Office Installer GUI.

After running the InstaDMG build and dropping the image on my USB boot stick, I rebooted and launched Word.

I was not prompted for the product key, so that part of it works fine. However, I *was* prompted to enter a name and company name to populate the OfficePID.plist. While that’s not a huge issue (and might actually be desirable if you want to personalize the install for each user after imaging the machine), I’m going to test adding my customized OfficePID.plist file to the same location in the installer package where SetupInfo.plist is and see if it gets dropped in by the installer as well.

Allan

[Rusty Myers]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: zanzan42[/u][p]My test was successful.

I actually left both ProductKey.bundle and RemoveOffice.bundle in the InstallerSections.plist. I’m not exactly sure what the RemoveOffice.bundle does yet, or whether it’s something I should remove from the InstallerSections.plist, but it didn’t adversely affect the install. I suspect it either installs the Office Uninstaller, or is what gets called if you choose Uninstall Office when in the Office Installer GUI.

After running the InstaDMG build and dropping the image on my USB boot stick, I rebooted and launched Word.

I was not prompted for the product key, so that part of it works fine. However, I *was* prompted to enter a name and company name to populate the OfficePID.plist. While that’s not a huge issue (and might actually be desirable if you want to personalize the install for each user after imaging the machine), I’m going to test adding my customized OfficePID.plist file to the same location in the installer package where SetupInfo.plist is and see if it gets dropped in by the installer as well.

Allan[/p][/QUOTE]

Just a guess, but RemoveOffice.bundle might install the Remove Office program?

[Anthony Reimer]

I’ve been doing various testing with the Office 2008 bundle (pre-authorized volume licence). Not meeting with much success. Did a full install (with the existing package). It succeeded but required the authorization noted previously. I created a package with LanRev InstallEase and the resulting image with that package in the build train only eliminated the need to specify the user and company name; I still had to create a user, let it run a font installer check and then open up Microsoft Software Updater. Am going to try my copy of Composer to see if it gives me a better/different package.

Anthony

[Anthony Reimer]

OK, I have finally packaged up all the things that will make 12.0.0 work without user intervention on first launch (for any local accounts, that is). When I get them sorted into anything reasonable, I will post the contents here.

However, I want to go back to an earlier post which suggested that the update package for 12.0.1 doesn’t work within InstaDMG. I can confirm this for both 12.0.1 and 12.1.0. Mac OS 10.5.3 does not improve the situation.

Anthony

[pteeter]

So, coming late to this party b/c I thought I had a good pkg installer earlier.

I’ve broken up the Office 08 base installer into 3 parts (using volume-license installer, so no s/n stuff to worry about, sorry to those of you who have to deal with s/n)…

1. Shared Files – Library files, etc.
2. Applications
3. Fonts – with preflight to move stuff around as MS wants

These seem to work just fine.

I converted the AutoUpdate 2.1.1 update to pkg no problem with logGen/pkgGen/PackageMaker.

I am struggling with the SP1 mpkg. As the last poster suggested, it won’t work ‘out of the box’ – command line attempts error out, some ps nonsense most likely to ensure all apps are shutdown and only a few of the enclosed pkg’s actually run.

I re-pkg’d SP1 with a preflight script to delete what the installer removes.

All apps work except Word is giving me fits. Won’t quit cleanly, won’t save to DOCX format. Very odd behavior.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

I can post my SP1 diff file it might help.

[pteeter]

So I tried this with SP1.

1. Create payload free package to delete all files deleted by SP1 installer, postflight script accomplishes.
2. pkg for Application files
3. pkg for Library/Automator files
4. pkg for Library non-Automator files

Sadly, same behavior. Excel, PPT, E’rage seem to work just fine. Word = no love. Will not quit cleanly, appears to have trouble saving Normal.dot…even if I pre-create the file in the users MUD directory. Word will save rtf, doc, txt, etc. formats but any attempt to save to docx forces Word to crash.

I could post the MS Word Error Report but don’t want to post gobs of MS-stack trace gunk.

I even tried swapping in a copy of the Word.app file from a known working instance of Office 2008 SP1. Still no dice.

Fun and way too time consuming.

Has anyone found a way to re-package SP1 successfully?

[eholtam]

Usually when I have problems like this in packaging FileWave filesets I log in as root and create the set. It could be some funky permissions issue that your local admin doesn’t have rights to. Its worth a shot.

-Eric

[zanzan42]

According to the MS Office 2008 site, they posted an updated SP1 installer package that works with ARD. Supposedly, they fixed the bug that was causing ARD pushes of the MS package to fail.

Allan

[Anthony Reimer]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: zanzan42[/u][p]According to the MS Office 2008 site, they posted an updated SP1 installer package that works with ARD. Supposedly, they fixed the bug that was causing ARD pushes of the MS package to fail.[/p][/QUOTE]

Could you perhaps provide a link to either the discussion or the changed updater? I re-downloaded the updater, tried it again and it continues to fail. I put it in the build process right after the Office 12.0 install package. (I am going to try installing the updater *after* the packages I use to customize the info and see if that changes anything, but if I don’t post back here, assume my attempt failed.)

Anthony

[Patrick Fergus]

Can Office 2008 SP1 install when the AutoUpdate patch hasn’t been installed? That might be your issue–12.0 -> 12.1 might not be possible without installing the AutoUpdate patch first.

The SP1 (12.1) update revision was to address ARD installations and [i]maybe[/i] CLI installs:

[url]http://www.microsoft.com/mac/itpros/default.mspx?CTT=PageView&app=ag&target=9043bbf9-501e-4bdd-a641-f9543698e9091033[/url]

– Patrick

[Anthony Reimer]

So good news and bad news. The good news: the 12.1.0 updater does work with ARD. The bad news: it still doesn’t work with InstaDMG in my workflow. I checked out the Auto Update suggestion and it seems to be bundled with 12.1.0, so that shouldn’t make a difference. Anyone finding love out there on this one?

[LoadStar]

My experience: Downloaded Office 2008 from the Licensing website, then dragged the package from the disk image to my InstaDMG workflow. Also downloaded 12.1.0 update and added that to the workflow.

Office 2008 seemed to install perfectly. I didn’t have to do anything to modify the installer from the one I got off the Licensing website. However, while 12.1.0 update didn’t error or anything, it just didn’t seem to do anything, the resulting image contained the 12.0.0 versions of the Office apps. It did, however, apparently install the 2.1.1 version of the AutoUpdate program. I’m a bit confused at that one.

[Author]

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