Office 2010 deployment: Updates and KMS activation

[jmak]

Hi Everyone

Just planning my Office 2010 deployment - Open Value Subscription finally became available on my Volume Licensing log in today. I've got a couple of queries I'd really appreciate some advice on before I commit to something I regret later............

Following the hints from @Michael (thanks ) I've got my high level deployment plan to test and am trying to fill in the gaps.

1) Updates: I'm using the Office Customisation Tool and can't quite see how to download the updates that I will want to deploy at the same time. Do I just need to go through the history on my WSUS server and include everything since SP1?

2) License activation: We are 100% Win 7 Pro with a single 2008 R2 server - all activated by MAK. KMS looks very attractive - sounds simple and looks like it would be more reliable than clients activating over the internet, so less likely to cause users any concern. So........are there any major disadvantages to using KMS just for Office activation? And given that we only have the one server is it an acceptable risk to add KMS to the live server? I've got clients that I can test the deployment on, so for testing I wouldn't need to make any other changes to the server, but my understanding is that I only get one chance to decide on the method of activation.

As ever, thanks in advance for all of your help.

[wadtech]

2) License activation: We are 100% Win 7 Pro with a single 2008 R2 server - all activated by MAK. KMS looks very attractive - sounds simple and looks like it would be more reliable than clients activating over the internet, so less likely to cause users any concern. So........are there any major disadvantages to using KMS just for Office activation? And given that we only have the one server is it an acceptable risk to add KMS to the live server? I've got clients that I can test the deployment on, so for testing I wouldn't need to make any other changes to the server, but my understanding is that I only get one chance to decide on the method of activation.

As ever, thanks in advance for all of your help.

VAMT is a tool for managing KMS, it's easy that way.

Product Activation Using Volume Activation Management Tool 2.0

just don't get the kms-server and kms-client keys mixed up, that can be painful (experience speaking!)

It's great because Office deploys with a kms client key by default so you don't need to enter anything there, just set up your kms server and activation takes care of itself.

KMS products automatically re-activate with your server every week, and if they can't contact it give themselves 180 days before complaining about it.

VAMT will also let you manage MAK keys and remotely apply them.

I hope that makes sense.

[Oaktech]

All of this... ^^^^

I've been there and got the T-Shirt, including the faux-pas with the MAK-KMS key.

[AngryTechnician]

Re: updates - my advice is to just let WSUS take care of it after the install. I started getting weird errors when I tried deploying updates at install time.

[chazzy2501]

btw you can use VAMT to convert MAK clients to KMS clients and force an immediate KMS activation as well.

[jmak]

btw you can use VAMT to convert MAK clients to KMS clients and force an immediate KMS activation as well.

Slightly off-topic, as it's not on my to do list for today....... Does this mean that if I re-image a machine which has a Win 7 MAK in VAMT, I won't have to activate the "new" install?

[wadtech]

Slightly off-topic, as it's not on my to do list for today....... Does this mean that if I re-image a machine which has a Win 7 MAK in VAMT, I won't have to activate the "new" install?

Depends if your image has office pre-installed or whether you deploy afterwards. If it's pre-installed with a MAK key, then it will need to be activated (but VAMT can be used to mass-activate machines which is nice.)

[jmak]

Sorry - my error. I meant will the Win 7 licence auto activate?

Once I've got Office 2010 deployed I'll take a new image to use as my master, which will have the KMS activated version of Office 2010 and the MAK activated Win 7 Pro.

[jmak]

Hi again. Please can I request a little more advice with my deployment?

I've installed VAMT as suggested above. Do I need to set up my KMS server as well, or is that it? Seems too easy! It has picked up the MAK licence for the server and identifies all of the clients in AD, but as I'm still early in testing, I don't have enough clients with Office to tell from the GUI whether the KMS licences are being activated.

I want to configure Office differently for staff laptops and pupil laptops - pupils don't need Outlook, Publisher or Access. Do I need to create two admin distribution points? I've got my .msp file in the Updates folder and it has applied the customisations I've been using for testing, but I think setup will only apply the first msp as a customisation file. The others in the folder are only applied after installation, which I think would be too late.

Thanks again