Ghost Solution Suite

Hey all. I have a unique situation...

We are a training center and I use Ghost constantly to image rooms, sometimes with Office 2007, 2010, Adobe CS5, etc...Most of my images now are created with Windows 7, and are triple boots (Office 2007 on one partition, Office 2010 on one partition, Adobe CS5 on another) to keep from imaging daily...

However, this is my issue...when I build my image from scratch, I will put in our VLK key for Windows 7 and Office 2010. I then Capture the image to our ghost server and redeploy it to, lets say 20 machines. Of course when I do so, I have to activate office and Win 7 on all 20 machines which is just fine.

HOWEVER

When I redeploy that image (even to the same machines) I have to activate again. Not really an issue, but I have found out that the reactivation uses ANOTHER KEY from our number of VLK's, instead of checking the Microsoft database via the MAC address, etc and seeing that the machine has already been activated. When I call microsoft about this issue, they blame ghost, when I call symantec, they say its a microsoft issue. What happens is about half way through the year, I'm out of VLK keys, and cannot activate my software anymore.

How do I get around this? We have plenty of keys for the number of machines we have, so i'm not stealing the software, but I dont need my keys reduced when I activate from a machine that I have activated on before. Seems a simple solution, If you reinstall Office at home because of a hard drive crash etc, and put your single key back in, it verifys the key is fine and it has been activated on that machine already and works like a charm...that is what I need...my only option to bypass this is to run virtual machines, but some of our machines do not have a large amount of memory so it would run slower than I need...

Any help would be appreciated...is it something as easy as doing a complete disk wipe before reghosting the image, and if so, how would I do that?

Thanks for your help! I need this fixed asap!

no pun intended :)

Anyway, you should rearm your Office 2010 installation prior to image it, using the following tool :

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\ospprearm.exe

If you don't want to update your existing images with a rearmed O2k10 installation, you can always use the following script to rearm after your image has been deployed :

@echo off

:ospp
reg query HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\OSPPREARM
if %errorlevel%==1 (goto rearm) else (goto end)

:rearm
set ProgramFilesPath=%ProgramFiles%
"%ProgramFilesPath%\Common Files\microsoft shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\OSPPREARM.EXE"
C:\Windows\system32\cscript.exe "%ProgramFilesPath%\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /act
set ProgramFilesPath=%ProgramFiles(x86)%
"%ProgramFilesPath%\Common Files\microsoft shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\OSPPREARM.EXE"
C:\Windows\system32\cscript.exe "%ProgramFilesPath%\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /act
REG ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\OSPPREARM"

:end
exit

Should I just put this in my startup to where it rearms automatically upon reboot, or is there a better way to handle it??

who will be the first account to log in after the image is deployed (priviledged / unpriviledged account).

I guess elevated rights will be necessary in order to execute the tool.

If your target computers are pre-equiped with the ghost client, you might aswell do this from the GSS console, with a simple "files and softwares action" deployment task.

Unfortunately i can't be more specific about it since i'm not using / deploying office 2010 at work....

Good luck !