Office 2010 Installation Failures

Everyone that has used any of the Office 2010 Beta’s know that the new office program just rocks! It certainly makes all the things they introduced in 2007 much much better and more user friendly…

However my post is not about how cool Office 2010 is but rather how much trouble it is getting it installed in the first place – especially when you have a previous copy of Office 2010 (one of the Beta’s).

I just upgraded my beta to a version I downloaded via my Partner MAPS program. However you need to first make sure you totally uninstall the previous versions before upgrading/installing the new version. This is something that may cause a bad response from customers – i.e. the customer upgrade/install experience :(..

This afternoon, I spent over an hour trying to get the new version installed without a hitch… It took about 4 different tries and many searches online to figure out why it kept failing…
Errors received: Error 2203 or 1935 both indicate some sort of access permission issues – even though I ran as Administrator and had full permissions to all the folders for Office installation.

Things I had to do to get the install to work include the following:
– uninstalling all office options – including
– Hotmail Connector
– Live Meeting (any version)
– Office communicator (any version).
– Make sure my account was added to all folders where office installs – under Program Files as well as under \windows\installer.

I then went into my Services.msc console and disabled and stopped Forefront Antimalware services – there are two related to forefront you need to set to disabled. After doing all of these, it’s good to reboot the system to make sure no office files are running nor Antimalware scanning is going on.

Next I went into the folders under Program Files\Microsoft Office and deleted what I could from that those folders. If you cannot delete some of the DLL’s, i suggest renaming them to something else and then rebooting after completing.

I then went into the registry and backed up some of the settings under HKCU\software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\.. there are folders for each application within Office where you can export settings such as where all your OneNote folders are as well as Outlook PST & OST files.

Finally after completing all of the above I was able to install Office 2010 Professional Plus without any blips.

The funny thing (or one of them anyway) about the failures is that it tells you the customer to call PSS for help on the setup and it references a path and a file on your computer that actually doesn’t exist :(.. So when the customer does end up calling PSS they have nothing to give to the PSS engineer :(… Pretty sad messaging there in the UI… The log files are actually found under: Systemdrive\users\username\appdata\local\temp\
the files start with: SetupExe(20100516..Plus a bunch of numbers).log
it is here that all the errors are reported and it takes a bit of searching to figure out what’s really going on.

Honestly, I think there is a lot to be said about proper error reporting as to why something doesn’t install properly. Rather than waste the customer’s time, why not just state in the installer for the customer to make sure all office applications + communicator are removed and to disable the antivirus software they are running before trying to install. Or make the installer do all these things for the customer so they’re experience will be made much better. Just a thought :)..

Anyway, I will continue to promote Office 2010 because I think it’s an awesome product… Where the customer may suffer is during the upgrade/install part. I hope Microsoft Office team can make things better for everyone prior to official release.