Office 2011 SP3 licensing

[jonscott]

Hi All, this is not directly related to Casper... but Office 2011 SP3 deployment is fogging my mind. Is anyone deploying a volume licensed Office with SP3? I've downloaded "Office for Mac Standard 2011 with Service Pack 3" from the volume licensing site and drop into Casper as usual.

Deployment is fine, but on application launch I'm presented with activation options, including:
-enter purchased product key
-sign into Office365
-trial mode
-use office in read-only mode

This is also true after applying the 14.3.1 patch.

Of course there is no product key available from volume licensing. Am I just missing something? I know there were licensing issues reported with the 14.3.0 update itself, but not sure if the two are related. I'm testing with the full Office download that includes SP3, plus adding patch 14.3.1. I have tried applying 14.3.1 directly to a 14.2.3 installation, without issue.

Jon

[jcurrin]

How are you building your software for deployment?

For example have you installed it and then packaged it in composer or are you just dropping the pkg contained inside the dmg?

[jonscott]

I'm just dropping a copy of the pkg into Casper Admin, which has worked well in the past (pre-SP3) as far as I remember. Seems times have changed!

No trouble with a direct install of Office w/SP3, so it looks like a Composer-built package should solve the problem...

[sgrall-pfg]

This will happen if the package is pushed without an actively logged in user; for whatever reason, it doesn't install the licensing file for volume licensing unless a user is logged in during installation.

If installing during imaging, make sure to check the option "This package must be installed to the boot volume at imaging time". If deploying to existing installs, you'll have to do some scripting or trigger modifications to ensure that the package only installs when a user is logged in.

[alexjdale]

I reported this to MS last year as a bug. If you installed the original Office installer package and then installed an update package before launching and activating it, it wiped out the license information embedded in the original package and prompted to activate and enter a license key on first launch.

I had to find the license file, package it up, and install it after installing update packages.

[sgrall-pfg]

alexjdale, another solution to the issue you described specifically is to download the full Office 14.2.1 or newer volume license installer from the Microsoft Volume License Service Center. As long as it's installed to an actively logged in user account, that version of the full installer or newer will not lose the licensing info if an update package is immediately installed afterward.

[jcurrin]

I built it in Composer. I would install Office, enter in my license info, run software updates, and then re-package Office using the prefilled templates in Composer. A little extra work, but it carried over the licensing information successfully. This also allowed us to customize launch settings for Office.

[jcurrin]

I built it in Composer. I would install Office, enter in my license info, run software updates, and then re-package Office using the prefilled templates in Composer. A little extra work, but it carried over the licensing information successfully. This also allowed us to customize launch settings for Office.