Office 2003 Upgrade

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(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

Thanx for reading this and hopefully you’ll have some better insight on how to do this better.

I’m trying to deploy an .EXE file to end users systems to upgrade MS Office 2003 from Office XP. We have a script that was created that handles all our custom settings and confirgurations and tested it on a number of local machines.

The problem comes when I try to deploy it via BigFix. I went through the Software Deployment Wizard and set the relevance criteria. I get the proper number of systems reporting back as needing the upgrade but when I set it to deploy, the deployment runs properly but for some reason the script doesn’t update the Office application correctly and the user gets an error message.

Hopefully this makes sense, I’ve been working on trying to solve this for a couple of days now and my head is now spinning.

Thanx,

David

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(imported comment written by brolly3391)

David,

When you run your EXE through BigFix you have to consider that it will be running under the SYSTEM account and will have the SYSTEM accounts permissions/rights on the local machine. This is a frequent sore spot.

If you are doing your upgrade using an MSI administrative install from a network share, the SYSTEM account will not have access to that share and it would fail to run.

Is your Office deployment per user or per machine? If it is a per user deployment, you might have to have the Update.EXE run with the user logged on and under the user’s context.

Either way, you might test out using the RunAsCurrentUser utility mentioned in this thread:

http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=74

If that does not do the trick, then posting the error message that the user gets and the timing of the error might provide some more clues.

Cheers,

Brolly

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(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Would it be possible to put the install .EXE somewhere on a shared location on the network and create the task:

RUN \SERVERNAME\SERVERSHARE\Office_Install.exe /s

???

Also, is there any documentation on how to use the RunAsCurrentUser utility?

Thanx again.

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey David,

I will see if I can dig up the documentation… but for now, luckily it is pretty simple and hopefully I can give you the info you need…

Usage:

RunAsCurrentUser.exe

–w

–w makes the RunAsCurrentUser process wait until after the subprocess exits before it exits.

Note:

RunAsCurrentUser will fail to run if there is no logged in user.

Example Actionscript (6.0 only):

waithidden RunAsCurrentUser.exe --w cmd.exe /C powercfg.exe /change

I think you have seen this thread too: http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=74

Ben

5

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

After I download the utility, where do I copy it to?

Also, what’s the command line that’s involved?

If I’m trying to RUN a file from a shared location, what is the syntax?

Example Actionscript: wait RunAsCurrentUser.exe “\server\share\Dept - IT\Office2003r3\Office2003_UPG.EXE” /s /a

Sorry for the rookie questions, but I’m kind of at a loss.

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey David,

Try something like this:

download http://support.bigfix.com/download/bes/util/RunAsCurrentUser.exe

wait __download\RunAsCurrentUser.exe “\server\share\Dept - IT\Office2003r3\Office2003_UPG.EXE” /s /a

Note that the logged in user will probably need to be an admin user if you are trying to install or upgrade anything.

Ben