How to prepare an Office 2013 Click-to-Run deployment

With the release of the Office 2013 preview Microsoft also made available the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run deployments. Although we here a lot about Click-to-Run these days, it’s not something totally new. Microsoft first introduced this with Office 2010 but it didn’t get that much attention within enterprise environment. For Office 2013 I can imagine that this will change.

Microsoft describes Click-to-Run as following:

Office 2013 Preview Click-to-Run is a technology that reduces the time that is required to download and use Office 2013 Preview client products. Click-to-Run is based on core virtualization and streaming Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) technologies. The streaming technology lets you use a Click-to-Run program before the complete program is downloaded and installed on your computer.

More details about the click-to-Run can also be found here. But let’s move on now and let me show you how easy it is to get this up and running.

First download the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run Preview from here store both files the setup.exe and the configuration.xml on a server share you have prepared upfront.

Then modify the configuration.xml file so it has the following content:

<!– <Updates Enabled="TRUE" UpdatePath="\\Server\Share\Office\" /> –>

<!– <Property Name="AUTOACTIVATE" Value="1" /> –>

</Configuration>

Next run the following command from an elevated prompt:

setup.exe /DOWNLOAD \\configuration.xml">\\configuration.xml">\\<Server>\<Share>\configuration.xml

Now logon to a Windows 8 or Windows 7 client and run the following command from an elevated prompt

setup.exe /CONFIGURE \\configuration.xml">\\configuration.xml">\\<Server>\<Share>\configuration.xml

And there we got Office 2013. You can now launch an application, while in the background additional bits are downloaded and installed. At some point all is done and Office 2013 is fully installed.