Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)

Inspired by Trond Eric Haavarstein’s evergreen PowerShell setup scripts, I created a download and install script for Office 365 Deployment Tool (ODT).

Microsoft Office 365 is the new standard in the EUC space right now. To honor this, we need a fast and reliable way to install it with our favorite deployment tools like MDT or PDQ,  for example when you rebuild your master images.

There are a few different ways to deploy Office 365, but they are all similar:

  • You need the Office 365 Click-to-run setup.exe (Office Deployment Tool (ODT))
  • You need a XML configuration file
  • You decide to deploy from a pre-build offline cache or the files are downloaded from Microsoft each and every time

And then you go: setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

Pretty straight forward you think, but non the less I had problems with this approach. And this is due to the fact, that the Office Deployment Tool itself gets updated pretty often. And this breaks your unattended deployments sooner or later, as the setup.exe stops working. Continue reading “Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)”

#virtualexpo: Create unattended Setups with AutoIt when no silent setup switch is available

When creating automated (Citrix) Master Images for MCS or PVS, you often encounter software for which no MSI and EXE silent switches are provided – and the vendor refuses to cooperate.
In this session, Marco Hofmann will show you how to write simple unattended AutoIt installation scripts that can automate installations for tools such as the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

Today is the #virtualexpo hosted by Trond E Haavarstein. I registered a slot as a speaker, to talk about my struggle to include apps in my Citrix MCS Golden Master Images, which I built with the Automation Framework Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), when the vendor doesn’t include silent setup switches in their setup files.

For this purpose I’m giving an example, about how to solve this issue with AutoIt.

I you want to hear my speech and all the other great speakers, take a look at the agenda and register!

Continue reading “#virtualexpo: Create unattended Setups with AutoIt when no silent setup switch is available”

Download and install latest Tablacus Explorer

In all of my current EUC deployments, I install Tablacus Explorer as an alternative to explorer.exe for use as a published application. This is an evergreen PowerShell script, that downloads and installs the latest version.

In one of my past articles I presented Tablacus Explorer as an replacement for explorer.exe in Citrix Virtual Apps und Desktops (formerly XenApp) as a published application. With automation more and more being mandatory in IT projects, I needed a way to install Tablacus Explorer evergreen with PowerShell each and every time I deploy it to Windows Clients, RDSH, Citrix virtual apps or desktops or in MDT Task sequences. Once again I used one of Trond Eric Haavarstein example scripts and altered it to fit my needs. Here are the results. Continue reading “Download and install latest Tablacus Explorer”