Office2003/Outlook2003 deployment

[Keith Schlottman]

I am trying to deploy Office 2003 to my organization with a Admin Install
point, I am creating a transform with the Custome Installation Wizard. The
only problem I am having is trying to configure the Exchange profile. I
enter in %USERNAME% for the variable in the Profile name, and my exchange
server in the exchange server name, but it is not populating the "USERNAME",
i used to be able to odo this in Outlook2000 using newprof.exe but apparently
this utility is not needed anylong with Office 2003 can anyone give me
insight on this?

Thanks,
Keith Schlottman
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Export the .prf file from the CIW (I think it's screen 20) and try running it by itself.

Do you have only one Exchange server? Do the mailbox aliases in Exchange exactly match the WIndows user login names?

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Keith Schlottman]

I tried exporting the .prf fiel and still no joy, but your comment about the
Exchange Aliases is very true. to answer your question on that no they do
not match the login names. So what I am understanding by that comment is, if
they do not match it will not work. is this true? Is there any other way to
get this accomplished other than changing all the exchange aliases? The
reason they do not match is because my billing system, uses the exchange
alias and it needs to be 3 letters. Let me know your thoughts on that. Thank
you for responding!

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Exactly. The .prf file needs some way to get the user's Exchange account alias. The normal configuration is to use the same value for the Windows login and the mailbox alias. In this scenario, you can use the %username% environment variable to specify the mailbox user name. When Outlook processes the .prf file at startup, it replaces %username% with the user's Windows login name, then proceeds to connect to the given Exchange server and look up the mailbox.

In your scenario, that won't work. You need to provide some other mechanism to give Outlook the correct mailbox name. Even though Microsoft doesn't guarantee that Outlook can look up any environment variable, I've never heard of a case where such a lookup failed. Therefore, one possible solution would be to use the login script to set a new environment variable, e.g. mailboxname, to the user's mailbox name. In that case, you'd use %mailboxname% instead of %username% in your .prf file.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Keith Schlottman]

Sue, thank you so much for your input, this will definitly help me. I
appreciate all the info you gave to me. I will post a response to let you
know how i make out. Thanks again!

 

[Keith Schlottman]

Sue, I am able to get the correct mailbox name using the USERNAME variable it
connects to the proper exahange account, but what my next problem is getting
the PROFILE name to match the users name. Can I also use a variable name in
the PROFILE name field? I tried using the USERNAME variable which is working
for the mailbox account, but it will not prefill the PROFILE name, is that
possible? THanks.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Sorry I didn't catch that you were original post made it clear that this was what you were trying to do. No, you cannot use an environment variable for the profile name, nor should you want to. Using a specific name, e.g. Exchange Mailbox Settings, will make it easier to provide support to users.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers