Microsoft Office 2007 automated installation - editing the config.xml file

Question

Hi all

I'm creating an automated installation of Office 2007. To customise your Office 2007 installation the Office Customization Tool (OCT) does most of the work for you. One the OCT's features is the ability to run additional programs during the Office installation. However it is pretty poor at it.

Fortunately by editing the appropiate 'config.xml' file contained within the installer files you have more control over running these additional programs. Within the config.xml file this feature is defined by the 'command' element. This link on Technet talks all about it.

In this documentation it states:

Attributes
You can specify double-quotation marks (") in the Path and Args attributes by specifying two double-quotation marks together ("").
<Command Path="myscript.exe" Args="/id ""123 abc"" /q" />

I would like to use double-quotation marks in an argument that I wish to pass to the command I'm executing. Unfortunately when I configure my config.xml file like what it is shown in the example the Office 2007 installer crashes with this error message in the setup logs:

Parsing config.xml at: \\aumel1pc356\c$\Documents and Settings\nichollsd2\Desktop\source\office\Enterprise.WW\config.xml
Error: XML document load failed for file: \\aumel1pc356\c$\Documents and Settings\nichollsd2\Desktop\source\office\Enterprise.WW\config.xml HResult: 0x1.

Does anyone have any experience with this issue? I'd love to get another perspective on it.

Cheers

Dale

Answer 1

In standard XML you embed quotes in attribute values using ", &34; or .

See the page on Wikipedia for a list of XML entity references.

I don't know if this will solve your problem, but seeing as it is an XML parser error it should.

Answer 2

I have used Office Customization tool to make a custom.msp file to install office enterprise , all goes well but the only problem is that the setup asks which product i have to install. that is i have to choose office enterprise . After that all goes unattended and ends up well . could you help me bypass that . I have included all the office source disk in the installation cd.