Installing Outlook 2007

The Office 2007 installation routine has been completely rewritten from the ground up. Now the Local Installation Source (LIS) is the standard method of installation; a fully compressed source is copied to the workstation on installation, and the installation is carried out from there. This makes the installation faster and more robust. When service packs or updates are issued in the future, there is no longer any need to provide the installation media (presuming you didn't remove the compressed LIS files after installation) because the full set of installation files are still right there on the workstation hard drive.

With previous versions, doing a customized deployment often meant either walking around and touching all of your workstations or using multiple tools to create customizations and "transforms" that you would apply to your installation.

Office 2007 has a single tool that lets you customize all of the settings in the product in one move. Its output is an XML file called config.xml, which you place in the \Updates folder and it will be automatically applied during setup.

We don't have time to go through every possible deployment scenario, so we'll go through the most basic one in this chapter to get you started.

Administrative Install

In Office 2003 you performed your base installation by running setup /A and actually doing an install to a share on a server that would serve as your base for client installs. In Office 2007, you simply copy the contents of the Office CD to a network share. Done.

Note 

Why wouldn't you just share the CD instead of copying it to a network drive? Actually, you can…if you don't intend to do any customizations and you're okay with an "out of the box" install of Office, and your users being prompted for product keys and other installation information. Most deployments will want to enter that information for the users, however, and an install from the hard drive will perform better than an install from the CD.

Once you've completed that step, copy any product updates you might have into the \Updates folder of the installation share you've created.

Languages

Office 2007 is designed to be language neutral - that means that the core application files are not specific to any language and adding additional languages is as simple as copying any language packs you want to the installation point and answering no if asked to overwrite duplicate Setup files.

Being language independent has several advantages over previous versions:

• It's easy to add additional languages. Just copy in the language packs.

• You don't have to have any language you don't want, including English.

• Updates are much smaller. In past versions, the core files, and their related updates, were larger because they included the English (typically) language files. In 2007, updates to the core files don't have to include any language features.

• Installation files are much smaller. In previous versions, if you wanted to install English and Japanese you needed two complete sets of the installation files. In Outlook 2007, the language-neutral core files don't have to be duplicated, which can save a considerable amount of space.

Customization

In previous versions of Office, there were a number of different tools you needed to use to customize your installation. Those tools have all been rolled into a single tool for customizing Office and Outlook 2007 - the unimaginatively named Office Customization Tool (OCT).

The OCT lets you configure your office settings ahead of time and will create a setup customizations file called an MSP file that you simply place in the \Updates folder of your installation share. When you run Setup on the clients, it will automatically apply whatever changes and customizations you've made.

To run the OCT type setup /admin in the installation directory.

There are four sections to the OCT - setup, features, additional content, and Outlook - and each section has several pages of options.

Setup

The setup section includes the primary options for setting up the application, including installation location, organization name, product key, and licensing. Outlook 2007 can't coexist with previous versions of Outlook and the setup routine will uninstall all previous versions of Office by default. The setup section gives you the option to tell Setup to leave certain installed applications (but not Outlook!) alone.

Features

The features section lets you specify which Office features should be installed and which should not be installed and set options like which features should be installed on first use. Keep in mind that, thanks to the Local Installation Source, if you set a feature to install on first use, it will be available to install when the user needs it, even if the user doesn't have the original media or is disconnected from your network. The Local Installation Source provides the install files needed to complete the installation on demand.

Additional Content

The additional content section is where you can specify files you'd like to add or remove to the workstation or any custom Registry entries you'd like to create or remove. This section also lets you specify any shortcuts you'd like to create on the user's machine.

Outlook

Outlook has its own section in the OCT. In the Outlook section you can customize the user's default profile, use an existing profile, or create a new one. If you lock down the computers so that the users don't have administrative rights, then the profile settings you make on install cannot be changed by the users. In this section, you can add additional accounts such as POP3 or IMAP accounts to the user's profile and even configure their send/receive groups if you like.

Client Deployment

At the client side, installation is as simple as initiating setup.exe from the workstation. That can be done manually by the end user or administrator, via a log-in script, or with any number of other utilities, such as Microsoft Systems Management Server, Altiris, and ScriptLogic. If you've used the OCT and correctly placed your MSP file, the setup routine will proceed without asking the end user for any input.

Note 

Some organizations may have need to migrate data from mail clients other than Outlook. Outlook 2007 does include a number of converters, but they cannot be automatically run during installation. Each user will have to migrate their data individually.

If you want to install other Office products, you need only copy those files from the CD to the same installation point and be sure to answer no when prompted to overwrite duplicate Setup files.

Autodiscover

Configuring Outlook 2007 is easier than in any previous version. If you're logged into an authenticated domain account, Outlook 2007 can look up your user record in Active Directory and automatically enter your alias and e-mail server.

Outlook 2007 has the ability, under certain circumstances, to automatically configure itself to connect to an information service and set up the profile with little or no input from the user. In order to enable this capability for your clients, you have to enable Autodiscover on an Exchange 2007 server that has the Client Access (CAS) server role installed.

Warning 

If you have to enable Autodiscover on the server, you will have to use the Exchange Management Shell to do so - it can't be enabled from the Exchange Management Console.

For more information about configuring Autodiscover on the server, please see the section "Configuring Autodiscover" later in this chapter‥

Autodiscover works for Outlook 2007 clients within your LAN as well as Outlook 2007 clients who will use RPC over HTTP, which Microsoft now calls Outlook Anywhere. Outlook Anywhere allows mobile users to connect Outlook 2007 to their Exchange server via regular HTTP protocol without having to connect to a virtual private network first. Essentially it tunnels RPC packets (the basic mechanism for Outlook/Exchange communication) over the HTTP protocol. Outlook 2007 can also usually autoconfigure your POP or IMAP account settings if you give it your e-mail address and password.