Custom Maintenance Wizard

You get one shot at applying an MST file to Office XP, and that's during installation. If you want to change settings after installing Office XP, you can use Custom Maintenance Wizard to modify almost everything that you can configure in Custom Installation Wizard, including user settings, security levels, Outlook profile settings, and so on. Custom Maintenance Wizard is one of the bigger improvements in the Office XP Resource Kit over the Office 2000 version.

The resource kit installs Custom Maintenance Wizard on the Start menu. Click Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office XP Resource Kit Tools, and then click Custom Maintenance Wizard. The program file Maintwiz.exe is in C:\Program Files \ORKTools\ORK10\Tools. The result of running the wizard is a CMW file that contains your configuration changes. For users to apply the CMW files that the wizard creates, you must copy Maintwiz.exe and the CMW files to the Office XP administrative share, which gives Custom Maintenance Wizard elevated privileges by proxy. Alternatively, you can use the policy Allow CMW files at any location to be applied.

The user interfaces of both wizards are almost identical, so I won't use much space describing how to use Custom Maintenance Wizard here. You specify new settings using Custom Maintenance Wizard's Change Office User Settings page, for instance. You can't use Custom Maintenance Wizard to deploy a new OPS file, however, so you have to run Profile Wizard separately (think logon script, and so on). Chapter 15, "Working Around IT Problems," has recommendations for pushing command-lines to users' computers.