Windows / Office Licencing

[Wayne Workman]

@gnoetzel Make a new image with MS Office unactivated, and use that. Others may have better advice, so stay tuned.

[Joe Gill]

@gnoetzel

We are using Office 2016.

So I went through all of what is listed here before and what I ended up doing was activating said office on pre-image. Then sysprepping. After I pushed the new image, office will prompt you to setup update service and licence on first use. It will licence as normal over the internet.

It’s still not the best solution, but… Until 2016 has KMS licence available, this is what I’m doing.

Good luck!!

Joe

[datastream]

@george1421 If I run this script as a snapin but change the second line to include a MAK instead of a KMS and then take out the third line, would that work for me?

[george1421]

@datastream Yes it should as long as the target computer has direct access to the internet to activate the MAK key. You can do some things if you have a proxy server between your target computers and the internet to make it work too, but its a bit more complicated.

[datastream]

@george1421 I have also followed the path in the first line and the path is empty. According to the command shouldn’t ospprearm.exe be in that folder?

[george1421]

@datastream well I can’t say for absolute since we use kms keys and we have it setup to auto activate.

I did just find these instructions that doesn’t use rearm.

cd c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14
cscript ospp.vbs /inpkey:XXXXX-YYYYY....
cscript ospp.vbs /act

You might want to see if you can manually activate office. You will need to chagne the office path based on the version of office you are trying to activate.

[Joe Gill]

@datastream
We ultimately ended up a virtual server hosting our kms server. We use this for both MS Office and Windows 7. Use Windows Server 2012 or newer, it’s much easier to set up.

[datastream]

I ended up getting it by putting the following in a powershell script:

cscript “c:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /inpkey:[License Key]
cscript “c:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

After it installed and ran this, I just had to log in as admin, open word, click to activate, set up update preferences and I was done.

[george1421]

@datastream said in Windows / Office Licencing:

cscript “c:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

One would have hoped this command would have activated it for you. There should be no need to manually go in and activate it.

Do your computers have direct access to the internet or do you/they have to go through a proxy server to get there?

[datastream]

Direct access. I will still have to go in and set the update preferences as admin.

[george1421]

@datastream Update preferences?? Can you enlighten me?

[datastream]

@george1421 So I just logged in and opened word. After it opens it has the window that says first things first and you choose how it will install updates. You have to be an admin to set that. After that the window pops that asks “How do you want to activate your software?”

After you click through those it is ready to go. Is there a way to automate that so it is done already? It’s not a big deal. I can login to each machine and click through those, but if it can be done I would set it up.