Remotely query MS Office installed components

[fafster]

Does anyone know of a way to query remote machines to work out which items in the MS Office 2003 package have been installed? For example, I need to work out whether or not MS Word/Powerpoint are there. Using spiceworks, I can see which machines Office is installed on, but I can't see which parts of it are.

[ajbritton]

Technically this should be possible either by examining the registry or using Windows Installer functions, but I suspect neither of these methods will be straightforward.

 

If I had to do this, I think I would write a script that does the following (it would need to be run against each PC, perhaps as a startup script or pushed using something like PSEXEC).

 

1 - Determine the local Program Files location (usually 'C:\Program Files')

2 - Scan through the sub-folders looking for folders containing word 'Office'

3 - Fully scan each sub-folder with 'Office' in the name, searching for known Office executables (winword.exe, excel.exe, msaccess.exe etc).

4 - If necessary, you can detect the version from the executable (AutoIt can do this quite easily) and deduce which Office version the feature is from.

 

I know that this sounds complex, but unless there is a Windows Installer expert out there who can tell me different, I think it would be the best way forward.

 

Now you just need someone to write the script for you.