Office 2007 Compatibility Pack deployment

Even if you don't want to acquire Office 2007 immediately, you may want to deploy the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack. The pack allows users running older versions of Office (2000, XP, 2003) to open, modify and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents generated by Office 2007.

Procedure to follow:

  1. Patch all your computers as recommended by Microsoft (see the download page of the Compatibility Pack for all system requirements).

  2. Download the compatibility kit from the Microsoft Web Site.

  3. Extract files on a share located on a server (\\ServerName\Share) using the following command line: FileFormatConverters.exe /extract

  4. Open RemoteExec and in the Configuration tree go to Remote Jobs/New Remote Job/MSI installation.

  5. Select the Msi file just extracted on a share (\\ServerName\Share\O12Conv.msi).

  6. Specify Install as operation.

  7. Optionally select Don't reboot in case a reboot is needed and you don't want to do it immediately. You can reboot Target computers later. You can also schedule this reboot overnight.

  8. Go to the Target Computers section and select the computers on which you want to deploy the Compatibility Pack.

  9. Click Launch to start the deployment of the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack on all these computers.

  10. You can follow the progression of the deployment in the Progress Window.

  11. If you get the error message Fatal error during the installation for some computers, this just means that some system requirements are missing for those computers (see the download page of the Compatibility Pack).