When making (virtual desktop) images with whatever tool you like (e.g. MDT, SCCM, RES Automation Manager) certain steps in a particular order (task sequence) are being executed. One of these steps is usually installing Microsoft Office. This installation might be very time consuming. Especially when more and new Microsoft Updates and patches will come available. When applied into a task sequence downloading, extracting and applying them just takes time. In this blog will de shown how to easy dowload them, extract them in the right format and apply them during the installation of Microsoft Office using a tool called WHDownloader (which means Windows Hotfix Downloader as it was formerly named). A tool that I used in several projects: WHDownloader, which is a freeware tool developed for the My Digital Life-community by Alphawaves.
In this blog 2 prerequisites need to be in place:
- A Microsoft iso file (for example SW_DVD5_Office_Professional_Plus_2013w_SP1_W32_English_MLF_X19-35821.iso);
- Microsoft DotNET 4 or higher;
First extract the Microsoft Office 2013 iso file into a folder with a name of your choice. Then browse to and then open the folder the extracted files are in. In this folder there is a folder called ‘updates’ with a file called readme.txt.
Any (.msp) files that are placed within this folder will be installed during the installation of Office.
When writing this blog version 2.1 of WHDownloader was available. It is delivered as a zip file with a readme.txt file and a WHDownloader.exe file.
After unzipping this and starting WHDownloader.exe and config.ini is being created.
With some options to set configuring the option ExtractMSP will be to True to extract the downloaded updates. Other settings that needed to be changed can also be changed and restart the application WHDownloader.exe.
Click on the blue arrow on the upper left. The most recent Update Lists will be downloaded and appear under the ‘Update Lists’ tab.
Click ‘Select Category’ and choose Office 2013 in this example. A list with all available General Updates, Hotfixes and Security Updates will appear. Also a folder called UpdateLists is being created with all the UpdateLists within it.
Select all Updates and Hotfixes that will be needed and press the ‘Download’ button to download and extract the selected files.
A folder called Updates will be created (because it was specified in the config.ini file) containing all updates files.
After the download has finished, there’s also a folder called MSP’s that contains the MSP.files
Copy or move the files within the created MSP folder to the ‘updates’ folder within the extracted Office iso file.
The last step is the upload the Office installation source to a folder where the sources reside that need to be executed during the install sequence and make a rule within the deployment tooling with the command line of the installation. In this case running Setup.exe with command line parameters.
That’s it! Working smooth as it used to do, but easier to setup when using WHDownloader.
