Office 365 installation tips and scripts

Hi all, if your like my self and many of my customers you’ve had issues moving from on premises Office installations – that use a MAK or KMS keys.

Seems when you think you’ve removed previous Office versions, and then login to Office365 and download then install the O365 installation you run into errors stating you still have previous versions of Office installed.

The solution is to FIRST completely remove ANY previous Office installations.

If you just use the ‘Program and Features’ control panel applet you are likely to still have remnants left.

To resolve this you can run the appropriate script s below and choose ‘ALL’ or whatever you feel is good enough.

[note: I have added the extension ‘.txt’ to these vbscript files. You need to remove that and leave the extension just ‘.vbs’ to run]

Here is a 7zip archive with all the scripts from Office 2007 to Office 365

Fix Microsoft Outlook – Exchange Is Unavailable, Outlook Must Be Online Or Connected

While setting up a few new users I was getting an error while trying to add a new email account.
While walking through the default setup – simply launching Outlook on a new users profile (who, of course, has and email account associated with his AD account) Outlook gave an error message that said, "The connection to Microsoft Exchange is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action."

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Now, I know that I’m online on the domain – the new user authenticated. AND I could ping the Exchange server via name too. Also since there are other users on this device and it’s fairly new I was pretty sure that it’s not a system error.

It finally seemed that the user (PC) was not able to see our domain controller as the global catalog server and hence was not able to find our mail server via Active Directory. [Why this was happening on only this user will have to be further investigated Smile ]

Per MS – This behavior occurs when the Exchange Server computer (where the Outlook client is homed) and the global catalog server are both located in a site that is remote from the Outlook client location. (article here).

The fix:

  1. Click Start, and then click Run.
  2. In the Open box, type regedit.exe, and then click OK.
  3. Locate and then click the following key in the registry:

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\Exchange Provider
    Note You may have to create the registry path.

  4. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:

    Value name: DS Server
    Data type: REG_SZ (string)
    Value data: FQDN of the global catalog server ( ourDC.domain.local )

Restart the PC and you should be able to reopen Microsoft Outlook and run through your profile set up. If finding the global catalog server was the issue, the problem should now be resolved and the email account should now properly add properly.

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