KMS Setup Office 2013

[Tech01]

Hi ,

 

I have KMS setup on my server which was done when the school has a new network installed and the school has just built a new Image for all its workstations but office will not auto license on the new image but will still on the old.

 

Am i missing something??

 

Thanks in advance

[snagrat]

Is Office in the build? Did you rearm it before capture?

[Tech01]

Office is in the image that I captured onto WDS.

I didn't rearm it, I didn't open office at all when I installed it on the image machine.

 

How do I arm it?

 

Thanks for the reply.

[3s-gtech]

From experience (of deploying Office 2013 many hundreds of times) you don't need to do anything special before capturing the image. You need to go down the normal KMS fault finding process -check that the server is showing correctly in DNS and resolving to the right address, and use VAMT to try pushing activation directly to the clients - it's errors are pretty verbose and will point you in the right direction.

[Oaktech]

Running this on a client in an elevated command prompt should let you see what your error is

 

cd /d C:\program files (x86)\microsoft office\office15\
cscript ospp.vbs /act

[sparkeh]

From experience (of deploying Office 2013 many hundreds of times) you don't need to do anything special before capturing the image.

You should be rearming Office before capturing your image.

Here is the MS guide on volume activation of Office 2013: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624357.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#section4

There is a 25-day grace period from the time of installation of Key Management Service (KMS) clients before notifications to activate are displayed to the user. If you want to deploy an image, you must rearm your Office 2013 installation before you capture the image. If you do not rearm, users see notification dialog boxes at the time that the image is deployed, instead of 25 days after deployment. The 25-day grace period gives ample time for a KMS host to be found and activation to succeed. If activation is successful, users do not see notifications to activate.

Rearm the Office installation

 

 

Rearming does the following important tasks:

 

• Resets the grace timer to 30 days.
  
• Freezes the grace timer until either an Office application is run, or the ospp.vbs script is run.
  
• Resets the client computer ID (CMID). This is important because the KMS host uses the CMID to determine the number of unique clients. To check the CMID, use the command ospp.vbs /dcmid. For more information about ospp.vbs, see The ospp.vbs script.
  

 

 

Its possible that the machines with the new image are all using the same ID.

Edited November 6, 2015 by sparkeh

[3s-gtech]

I should rephrase. I haven't had to do anything special before capturing the image. The grace period shouldn't be an issue if you have VAMT - just check the activation status of any new deployments. I've never had an issue with the CMID at all, I just sysprep. They all show up fine as separate and unique clients still. Not saying that this is the practice anyone should follow, but it would suggest this is probably not the OP's issue.