Office 2008 Installer, InstaDMG compatible

[Patrick Fergus]

[speculation]

The reason for the AutoUpdate succeeding and everything else failing is probably traceable to the fact that Office 2008 is a bunch of packages glued together as a metapackage (it’s why it creates some 15 receipts). Whoever wrote the AU installer probably wrote it to handle non-boot volumes, while the new stuff in SP1 wasn’t written as well.

[/speculation]

It might be easier to build your own Office 2008 installer by installing all the pieces, scraping the changes, and then creating your own pkg.

– Patrick

Edit: The forum ate my “speculation” tags.

[Chris George]

What I’m actually considering is creating an installer package that copies the updater to the image, and adds some sort of a script triggered by launchd that executes the updater, then gets rid of the updater and the script. I notice a few other people attempting (to mixed results) launchd’s that self-annhilate themselves, so I’m not sure how successful I’ll be.

–Chris

ETA: On second thought, probably a bad precedent to set, because it’s likely that the next update that Microsoft releases will probably require 12.1 to be installed first… and continuing along the lines of the above idea would require an ugly chain of updates to be included and executed each time a computer first starts up after being imaged. Ugh. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

[eholtam]

For those that have just gotten 12.1.0 to work there’s now a 12.1.1 update out.
Office 2004 got an update as well. Plus the XML converter tool is now 1.0.

[Anthony Reimer]

OK, I gave up on getting Microsoft’s packages to work, so I repackaged the original installer plus the 12.1.0 combo and the 12.1.1 delta. Works great. Found out through some testing that there are three plist files that are user-specific that I have kept outside of my main bundle. They are all in ~/Library/Preferences.

• com.microsoft.office.plist
Has the flag 2008\FirstRun\SetupAssistCompleted, plus the user name and initials.

• com.microsoft.setupassistant.plist
Has only one (innocuous) key, but this file seems like it needs to exist to confirm that Setup Assistant has done its work.

• com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
This is only if you want to set the default to Manually or similar (of course, I guess you could remove MAU2 entirely).

LanRev InstallEase helped me make a nice little package that pushes those three files out to the local user directory, but of course, that would not work in InstaDMG. I did try to build a package that just had the three files and then made an mpkg with duplicate copies directed at each local home directory, but permissions seem to be a problem. Any thoughts on how to do this effectively would be welcomed.

Anthony

[mattzago]

For pushing out the user profile specific files with Instadmg, I’ve just been sticking what I need into /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj. When a new user logs in the system creates the home folder from that template. Just make sure to have the pkg you create for the user customizations be in the CustomPKG folder AFTER any packages you have that create users (otherwise the user will be created before the template has the good stuff).

When you create this package just follow the permissions already set for the User Template folder and you should be fine.

[Patrick Fergus]

Tossing a reply onto the end of this thread so it sorts correctly.

Awesome–I wasn’t even [i]born[/i] when I posted the previous reply on Wednesday, December 31 1969 @ 06:11 pm CST.

– Patrick

[chilcote]

[QUOTE][i]

LanRev InstallEase helped me make a nice little package that pushes those three files out to the local user directory, but of course, that would not work in InstaDMG. I did try to build a package that just had the three files and then made an mpkg with duplicate copies directed at each local home directory, but permissions seem to be a problem. Any thoughts on how to do this effectively would be welcomed.[/i][/QUOTE]

So as not to duplicate effort I like to use the same packages created by InstallEase for both InstaDMG and ad hoc deployment. Then I include in InstaDMG a StartupItem which copies the files at /Users/Shared/LANrevInstallEase_FilesForHomeDirectory to the User Template. This way the script traps for any changes that have been added to the various packages rather than requiring a manual repackaging of everything into the User Template.

[Anthony Reimer]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: mattzago[/u][p]For pushing out the user profile specific files with Instadmg, I’ve just been sticking what I need into /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj. When a new user logs in the system creates the home folder from that template. …[/p][/QUOTE]

This worked splendidly! Thanks for the tip.

Anthony

[Chris George]

FYI: For all you volume licensing customers, Microsoft has posted an Office 2008 ISO that has SP1 rolled in to the Licensing website. This may help those who really, really, REALLY wanted to avoid making a custom package. 😉

[lsachs]

I applied the 12.1.2 update to Office and made a package using LAVrev InstallEast. Works well! Make sure you duplicate the folders you want…. /Applications/Microsoft Office and Library/Application Support/Microsoft/ and choose MAU2.0 folder. Added it to InstaDMG image and works well… if you catch typos in folder names first… ;-}

[Author]

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