Custom Maintenance Wizard

Custom Maintenance Wizard

You get one chance to apply an MST file to Office 2003 Editions, and that's during installation. If you want to change settings after installing Office 2003 Editions, you can use the Custom Maintenance Wizard to modify almost everything that you can configure in the Custom Installation Wizard, including user settings, security levels, Microsoft Outlook profile settings, and so on. The Custom Maintenance Wizard is one of the biggest improvements in the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit from the Office 2000 version.

The resource kit installs the Custom Maintenance Wizard on the Start menu. Click Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit, and then click Custom Maintenance Wizard. The program file Maintwiz.exe is in C:\Program Files \ORKTools\ORK11\Tools\Custom Maintenance Wizard. The result of running the wizard is a Custom Maintenance Wizard (CMW) file that contains your configuration changes. For users to be able to apply the CMW files that the wizard creates, you must copy Maintwiz.exe and the CMW files to the Office 2003 Editions administrative share, which gives the 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 describe how to use the Custom Maintenance Wizard here. You specify new settings using the Custom Maintenance Wizard's Change Office User Settings page, for instance. You can't use the Custom Maintenance Wizard to deploy a new OPS file, however, so you have to run the Profile Wizard separately. (Think logon script, and so on.) Chapter 18, “Fixing Common IT Problems,” has recommendations for pushing command lines to users' computers.