Deploying Box for Office Integration using SCCM – Part 1

This is likely something that’ll be rolled out in our organisation soon which is why I wanted to try this out in my lab beforehand.

We’ll start off with a high level overview of how I plan to meet the pre-requisites for this application and then proceed to implementing that in SCCM. This will probably be a pretty long post so I won’t be providing step by step instructions. Part 2 will cover creating the Box for Office Integration application, setting the application dependencies and testing our deployment.

Let’s take a look at the Box for Office integration pre-requisites:

• Windows 7 or higher
• Microsoft Office 2010 or higher
• Windows Installer 3.1, 4.5, or greater
• NET Framework 4.0
• Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office v10.0.50701 or greater

Now, let’s take a look at how we plan on meeting these prerequisites for the deployment:

• We’ll create three device collections to identify computers with office 2010 or higher, each limited to Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 computer collections respectively. This will allow us to deploy the application to one collection at a time. Each collection will only contain computers with Windows 7 or higher AND Office 2010 or higher.
• We can safely disregard the Windows Installer requirement since the installer version is greater than 4.5 on all our operating systems in our collections by default
• We’ll create separate applications for the .NET Framework 4.0 and the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime in SCCM. For each application we’ll set the detection rule to check for the presence of specific registry keys/values in order to detect if the application is installed or not.

This will effectively meet all the prerequisites and we can proceed with deploying the application in Part 2. Now, let’s get onto implementing this in SCCM.

1) Create the Collections to Deploy the Application To

We’ll start off by creating separate device collections for Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 computers. We’ll then create three collections with Office 2010 or higher installed and limit each to the Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 device collections respectively.

a) Create a device collection each for Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10:

The WQL queries to use for each OS version is provided below:

Windows 7

Deploy Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 using SCCM

I’m planning on writing an article on deploying the Box for Office Integration client package using SCCM which requires the .Net Framework to be pre-installed (amongst other pre-requisites) so I thought I’d first write this post on deploying the framework so I can refer to it in the upcoming post.

We’re going to deploy this as an application and not a package since you can only have dependencies on applications.

Download the .NET Framework 4.0 Standalone Installer

To start off download the .NET 4.0 standalone installer from Microsoft and save it to your SCCM software repository.

I briefly mentioned the importance of having a clear and easy to understand folder structure to store your images, software and packages in the repository. Personally, I have a dedicated folder called “.NET Frameworks” with subfolders for each version that I’ll be deploying.

Make a note of the UNC path where you save the installer.

Create the .NET Application in SCCM

Again, I suggest you create a dedicated folder for .NET Frameworks under Application Management > Applications and create subfolders for each .NET framework version that you’ll be deploying.

Right-click on your chosen folder under Applications and select “Create Application”.

Customizing Internet Explorer 11 using the IEAK

I was having a discussion with my manager about Internet Explorer 11 and its “Enterprise Mode” recently when I had the idea for a couple of posts on this subject. I thought I’d start off with customizing IE using the IE Administration Kit (IEAK) and then move onto configuring Enterprise Mode using Group Policy in a follow-up post.

There’s not really much to the admin kit and customizing IE is a pretty straightforward process. Let’s take a look at the process here.

Install the IE Administration Kit (IEAK)

Download the IEAK from Microsoft and proceed with the installation. The installation wizard is pretty self-explanatory. Be sure to select the correct licence type as shown below:

Download the Prerequisite Updates for IE11

Download the prerequisite updates from Microsoft and save them all in one directory. Extract each update package one by one using something like 7-Zip which will give us the .cab cabinet file which we’ll bake into our IE11 installer later on.

Here’s an example of an update package after it’s been extracted. Note that we need the cabinet file with the same name as the update.

Customize IE using the IEAK

Launch the Internet Explorer Customization Wizard from Start > Windows IEAK 11

A lot of the screens in the wizard are self-explanatory so I won’t provide screenshots for them all here.

1) Select the destination folder where you want the final IE11 installer to be saved