Office 2011 giving activation message, asking to personalize office, keep office up to date, etc

[drowe]

I installed Office, personalize my preferences, packaged it and deployed it to a few computer. Every user is giving activation message, asking to personalize the products and ask two questions after. When I did the install, it didn't do any of that. I deployed the application using FUT. Any ideas why this would be happening. Bear in mind, i package the app using pre-installed software.

[mm2270]

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office 14\FirstRun\SetupComplete -int 1

That writes in a setting to the user's com.microsoft.office.plist (or creates it if its not there) with a setting that bypasses most of the setup screens. They may still be asked to enter a name when launching apps like Word, since Word likes to store user information in its preferences.

Note that in the above, its running against a users account as them. If you try that from Casper it will be trying to do that to the root account, so you need to account for that with some logic to pull the local user accounts or just the logged in user, whichever you choose to do.

You could also look at managing that in Managed Preference if you're using that on your JSS. I'm pretty certain there's already something in the built in template for that.

[drowe]

Unfortunately, I don't see much in manage preferences to handle this but I will definitely look into it.

[mm2270]

There are, you have to scroll down the list, but there should be some templates for Office 2011 stuff.
in poking at this just a minute ago, it appears the latest versions of Office require something more to make those setup screens go away, so unfortunately the defaults command above, or even just a managed preference for it, won't help much. I'm not sure now what Office requires to be convinced that the user already saw those screens.

[drowe]

Than you mm2270, I have looked at these setting and I don't know how I never saw this. You're a life saver....appreciate the guidance.

[cdenesha]

I did not know about that setting, and only have Casper for iPads. So what I did (after basic configuration) was figure out the minimal plists required so a new user would not be prompted for anything, and copy those into the default User Template for new users.

~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.error_reporting.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.outlook.databasedaemon.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Powerpoint.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist

[mscottblake]

There's a lot of great information on which MCX settings to set at http://www.officeformachelp.com/office/administration/mcx/ (you can thank @talkingmoose)

With Office 2011, it takes quite a few preferences to fully eliminate those messages from every application, but once they are in there, you should never have a problem with it again, and won't even have to worry about it when you're packaging Office in the future.

Hope this helps!