OverRide woes (Office 32 to 64 Upgrade)

1

I’m trying to create a task to uninstall 32 Bit office 2013 and then reinstall Office 2016 64 Bit.

The install portion works fine (send folder, extract, run as current user) and basically looks like this:
override wait
runAs=CurrentUser
Hidden=True
wait cmd.exe /c __Download\setup.exe

Something is wrong with my uninstall task though. It looks like this:

override wait
Hidden=True
runas=CurrentUser
wait cmd.exe “\SERVER\2013 Pro Plus x86\setup.exe” /uninstall ProPlus /config “\SERVER\2013 Pro Plus x86\proplus.ww\SilentUninstallConfig.xml”

This portion produces an “Exit Code=1” in the log and shows succeeded but doesn’t do anything which causes the install to fail since you you can’t upgrade across bits.

Running the action in the debugger gives a “Thread Execution failed (1314) error” in line 6. Removing the runas line results in the task completing but not running successfully (exit code one like running for real). Finally, removing the cmd.exe portion allows it to succeed in the debugger (without runas) but results in a 740 failure in live (with runas). And removing the runas from the live results in an error 5.

Permissions to the directory are everyone.

So what am I missing?

2

Why are you running your installer/uninstaller as the current user?

You typically should be installing or uninstalling for ALL USERS system wide using the SYSTEM account that BigFix uses normally.

3

When I was creating the previous 2013 installer, the setup would never complete when run as system. When I did some research on it, it seemed that office’s installer needs to run as an actual user. The normal installer portion of it works perfectly fine. It is the uninstaller portion that doesn’t want to run (as current user or system).

4

I’d say about 99% of the software I install through BigFix is done system wide using the SYSTEM account. Installing per-user applications as the current user is difficult because you have to do this for every user that logs into the system at least once, but you can’t do it until they log in.

It could be the case that Office 2016 is a per-user install, but I’m fairly certain Office 2013 is not. I’m guessing there was something else wrong with what you attempted.

This could be related: Office 365 installation completed but action returns exit code :17002 or 17004

5

So any ideas on a way to uninstall office 2013 via bigfix? I’ve even tried the straight MSIEXEC uninstall string and it doesn’t seem to work either, so it might be unique to 2013.

6
  1. Figure out how to successfully uninstall Office 2013 on the command
    line using an admin account.
  2. Once that works, try it with the SYSTEM account using PSExec.
  3. Once that works, try the same command with BigFix. Provide the
    actionscript you are using here so it can be checked for correctness
    if this doesn’t work.