Managing the Save My Settings Wizard

The Save My Settings Wizard allows users to back up their Microsoft Office settings to a file or to the World Wide Web. If the user saves to the World Wide Web, the wizard saves the settings to the Microsoft Web site and uses a Passport account to help secure the settings. The settings are not accessible by Microsoft and are not used for any purpose other than allowing users to restore their settings.

Note

The Save My Settings Wizard is the end-user name for the Office Profile Wizard, an administrator tool. For more information about what settings are preserved when you run these wizards, see “Customizing User-defined Settings” in Chapter 4, “Customizing Office 2003.”

The Save My Settings Wizard is installed with the default installation of Microsoft Office 2003. If you do not want users to be able to use the Save My Settings Wizard, you can disable it during Setup. If you just want to disable the ability to upload the settings file to servers on the World Wide Web, you can do so by using a policy.

Disabling the Save My Settings Wizard

To use the Custom Installation Wizard to disable the Save My Settings Wizard in the Office installation, go to the Set Feature Installation States page and set the following feature to Not Available:

Office Tools\Save My Settings Wizard

When you deploy Office with this setting, the Save My Settings Wizard will not be available to your users. If you later want to make the wizard available, you can use the Custom Maintenance Wizard to add the Save My Settings Wizard again.

Controlling Save My Settings Wizard options

If you want to allow users to use the wizard but not to save their settings to a Web site, you can disable the Web functionality only by using a policy. To stop users from saving their settings to the World Wide Web, open the Office11.adm administrative template in the Group Policy snap-in and set the following policy:

Microsoft Office 2003\Save My Settings Wizard\Prevent users from uploading settings to the Internet

You can also set a default location (such as a specific location on your corporate network) to store users’ settings files. To set the default storage location, open the Office11.adm administrative template in the Group Policy snap-in and select the following policy:

Microsoft Office 2003\Save My Settings Wizard\Default location to store settings file (OPS)

For more information about using policies to help control user options, see “Using Group Policy to Deploy Office” in Chapter 5, “Installing Office 2003.”