Modify the Save As Button for Office 2007 Through DS

By now, many people have migrated their users over to Office 2007. I did at my company for two main reasons. The first was to standardize everyone on the same platform and the second was to prepare for the upcoming Exchange 2007 deployment.

From our end, this was a very successful migration, but it ended up causing some problems. Our parent company, is still on the Office 2003 suite. They have plans to upgrade, but that is several months down the road for them.

So the problem is if our users save a document and send it to them, they cannot read it unless they download the Compatibility Pack from Microsoft.

So I was tasked to come up with a solution that would get our users saving in the Legacy format at least until the parent company migrates.

I initially came up with 2 options:

1. Tell our users to remember when sending files to the parent company to remember to click SaveAs and choose the Legacy File format. Not very practical.
2. Go into the Options of each application and change the save option to the legacy format. Yes this would work, but it is a manual process and would take a LOT of time to do....yuck.

So I started to think there has to be a way to do this and leverage the power of Altiris to deploy it.

Upon searching the Internet, someone else was having the same issue I was (imagine that) and discovered the registry settings that handled this. He came up with a batch file that changed the settings so that when you click the save button, the default format was now Legacy.

1. Take the content of the attached Office2007SaveAs.txt file and save it as a Batch File and place in your DS. This will change the registry settings so that when the users click the Save button, the default format is the 97-2003 Legacy Format.
2. Take the content of the attached Office2007reset.txt file and save it as a Batch File and place in your DS. This will change the registry settings back to the default settings.

Once you have the files in place, all you need to do is create a job and deploy to your users. Another option is you could update your Group Policy and deploy through a startup script.

With any of the Office applications running, DS will say the script executed fine, but in the application the settings never changed, even after rebooting.

So if you run this through DS, you have to ensure the users are either logged off their machines or if logged in ensure that none of the Office applications are running.

Either way, I thought that there might be someone else out there struggling with this same issue and I thought I would share a solution.