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Question

change user info - Office 2008?

  • December 21, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 9 views
A
  • Anonymous

Hello World,

does anyone have any experience replacing Office 2008 user information on existing installs?
I found the Office PID file that will change the name on the splash screen, but I'm hitting a brick wall on modifying the personal info.

My situation;
Any new user that has an Office 2008 install, will have their personal info set to my name. (cause I ran the original install and captured it that way)
At the time, it did not seem like a major issue cause prior to deployment, we would also set up their Entourage and at that time, modify the name in the address book.
Well, looks like a bunch got out, without that mod and now I get calls requesting to close out of a document that they believe I have open.

My goal;
Would like to make it as transparent as possible, while maintaining existing users Entourage database.
User name that appears at application launch can be modified at /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist and seems like that will be a snap to push out via Policy.
The PID file can even be modified/replaced while the Office applications are open.

Now, the mental twister is how to modify the User Info that appears in Word - Preferences - User Information
Also seems like Word and Entourage are the only applications that allow the change of the user's initials.

So far I have been unsuccessful at using Composer to help me capture where and how this data gets modified, so I'm hoping someone out here can offer some guidance.

- thank you

Nick Caro Apple Systems Administrator
Phone 212-839-1587 Fax 212-946-4010 nick.caro at rga.com<mailto:nick.caro at rga.com>

R/GA 350 West 39th Street New York, NY 10018 www.rga.com<http://www.rga.com/>

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    1 reply

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    • bkvines
    • Contributor
    • December 21, 2009

    Nick,

    I've been looking into this, because I have a similar situation -- Users asking, "Why is SysAdmin using my document?"

    This can be done via AppleScript. The code below will set the User Name within Excel, Word, and PowerPoint:

    set theComputerUserName to "John Smith"
    tell application "Microsoft Excel" to set user name to theComputerUserName
    tell application "Microsoft Word" to set user name to theComputerUserName
    tell application "Microsoft PowerPoint" to set user name of preference object to theComputerUserName

    Note that Excel doesn't have a location for User Initials in its GUI preferences. Word does, and also has a corresponding commandj (set user initials).

    Note also the funky syntax for PowerPoint. That took me a while to figure out.

    In my testing, this generally seems to cause the Office apps to quit unexpectedly *unless* the apps were not running when the command was issued. If Excel was not running, and this AppleScript code caused it to launch, Excel would not quit unexpectedly. But regardless of whether the apps unexpectedly quit, the name would be set. It would be best to run the script at login time.

    At present I have a full AppleScript which will grab the name of the logged in user from System Info, quit the Office apps if they're running, execute the "set user name" commands, and quit the Office apps. It's sort of long-ish, so I'm not sure whether I should post it to the list, but if you want a copy of it, let me know and I'll email the script to you.

    --
    Bryan Vines
    bkvines at wgclawfirm.com

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