Office 2016 - Pesky .XML File Looks To Other Systems
I worked with the OCT program to create a "work in process" setup while working on the templates to make Office more secure (you would be shocked to see how unsecure Office is until you install those Group Policy templates and start looking at them). I checked in with this site and see some really nice info that was not on the Microsoft site like how to suppress the reboot. But I have run into issues such as any attempt to run the installer silently with the custom.msp file just resulted in the dialog box as if you never created the file with OCT.
When I looked inside the custom.msp.xml, which was created automatically, it has references that make me scratch my head. If you run OCT locally on the server it includes references to the C: drive where the files reside and the user profile. If I run it with a mapped driver it refers to the server, but no one outside of IS has any access to the server. All of this is before trying to push the deploy with PDQ Deploy...
Comments
Have you tried to copy the installation package to the target machine?
Does the XML look like the sample here ? (I know its for 365, but essentialy it has just another label)
No, the XML file is very basic and only has one element for SkuManifest. I originally ran the OCT program on my PC while mapped to a file share where the Office media existed. Inside that SkuManifest element are line items that begin with FileTransfer and use a src that point to my local profile and map to the file server\share where I ran OCT. I did all of my basic setup/testing on a VM that used this file server\share, but when I copied the entire folder over to PDQ Deploy the same exact commands failed. The behavior was the same as just launching setup.exe without a custom.msp file.
I reran the OCT program locally on the PDQ Deploy server and the custom.msp.xml file has references to the local profile on the server and references to the PDQ Repository where the Office files are located. Curiously I can run the install unattended manually or deploy via PDQ Deploy without any issues so far. I am just surprised that running OCT results in any file being created that has references to the local or remote path where an end user may not have access.