Bypassing Microsoft Office 2011 First Run Screen

[blackwoodT]

Hi,

I'm currently working on our image for the beginning of the school year, this our first year using Casper so still learning all the in's and out's. I have created a package for office 2011 and it works successfully the only problem I am having is that upon first opening word a "Help improve microsoft office" screen opens requiring a selection for autoupdates and opting into the customer experience program. I have tried setting the casper built in MCX option for Office Setup assistant but that doesn't work.

As we are a school and students share computers the box will appear everytime they login and open Word unless they use exactly the same computer each time so this is quite an annoying problem for us.

Any suggestions would be great,

Thanks,

Will

[daz_wallace]

Hi @lelongw

There's a particular set of preference files and values that office needs by default (for each user) to stop this popping up.

I'm guessing previously you used Open directory-delivered MCX and / or the user template folder to get these things out to your users?

If using the built in Casper MCX didn't work, might I suggest:
1) Try setting the MCX to be a computer level rather than user. People have reported a few issues recently with user-level MCX
2) Try uploading the completed plist files into a configuration profile using the 'custom' section and deploy this to your Mac clients.

I hope that helps!

Darren

[sidhu_navdeep]

Hi,

By any chance, are you using Composer application which is part of Casper suite?

If yes then you can package Office application using Composer which should help you to skip all the unwanted steps.

Thanks

[bentoms]

FWIW, in the JSS managed preferences the key shows as:

com.microsoft.office
14FirstRunSetupComplete

[daz_wallace]

I believe you also need the ones for the autoupdate, username and company too otherwise that key gets ignored.

However, I may be wrong!

Darren

[daz_wallace]

Aha! This is what I was after:
http://www.officeformachelp.com/office/administration/mcx/

[franton]

Paging @talkingmoose ... I believe this site is his labour of love.

[talkingmoose]

Hah! Thanks @franton!

If using Casper then I endorse using configuration profiles (or MCX if not able to use profiles). Managing Office for Mac 2011 was my demo in the talk I gave at PSU Mac Admins last year.

If you've got an hour to kill...

The video: http://talkingmoose.net/2014/07/psu-macadmins-posts-conference-videos-for-2014/

And the presentation slides: http://talkingmoose.net/2014/07/posting-my-psu-macadmins-conference-presentation/

[daz_wallace]

I'd heavily recommend watching @talkingmoose 's video, even if you have to do it over lunch!

Darren

[blackwoodT]

Thanks everyone for the help, watched the video and used the plists from @talkingmoose and all worked perfectly, have tested on several machines so far this morning.

Will

[timdambrosio]

@talkingmoose in the com.microsoft.office.plist can you pass through the logged in users name as a variable instead of setting it manually in the plist?

[talkingmoose]

@timjd4, you can use something like Lingon or LaunchControl to create a launchd agent to run a one-liner when the user logs in to the computer:

defaults write com.microsoft.office 14\UserInfo\UserName "$( id -F )"

If you've examined the Office 2016 Preview for Mac, you'll see the splash screen no longer displays user and business information. May not be worth the effort to customize them in Office 2011 unless you really want it.

[bpavlov]

@timjd4 I wouldn't say it's just about the splash screen. There are certain features within Office that utilize the username for documents that are edited by multiple people and tracking changes. So it's definitely worth looking into if you make use of that feature. You can definitely manage things with a config profile if so inclined and even use the $username variable in a custom profile. I have a post I made a while ago describing some of the options that can be used. Some already documented by @talkingmoose
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=13946#responseChild89016

It's a great thread overall because it covers a couple of different topics.

Not sure that profiles will work with Office 2016 though as I believe those apps are now sandboxed.