Customizing Office 2013 Setup using the Custom.xml file.

Recently, i was working on an Office 2013 SP1 ISO file this one was downloaded from Microsoft partners site. For Silent deployment of  Office 2013 SP1 i created a Custom.MSP file & saved it to the updates folder but when i tried to run the office setup the installation was not silent.

So, i tried to run the setup using the Custom.xml file method.

My Requirements were :-

1. Only Lync should be installed from Office 2013 SP1 Suite & all other product installation must be  suppressed.
2. It should not uninstall previous version of Office.

So, here i created a custom.xml file with the following settings.

Custom.xml File :-

<Configuration Product="ProPlus">

<Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="no" SuppressModal="yes" AcceptEula="yes"/>
<Setting Id="REMOVEPREVIOUS" Value="" />
<OptionState Id="LyncCoreFiles" State="local" Children="force"/>

<OptionState Id="GrooveFiles2" State="Absent" Children="force"/>
<OptionState Id="WORDFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="PubPrimary" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="PPTFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="OUTLOOKFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="TOOLSFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="OneNoteFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="XDOCSFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="EXCELFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />
<OptionState Id="ACCESSFiles" State="Absent" Children="force" />

</Configuration>

Details :-

Display Level="none" CompletionNotice="no" SuppressModal="yes" AcceptEula="yes"

This suppresses all the UI which we receive at the time of installation. You will not receive a completion notice & you have accepted EULA (End user license agreement) too in the above statement.


<Setting Id="REMOVEPREVIOUS" Value="" />
 
The value of  REMOVEPREVIOUS is set to nothing. So it will not uninstall any of the previous version of Office from the machine were this package runs.


<OptionState Id="LyncCoreFiles" State="local" Children="force"/>
<OptionState Id="GrooveFiles2" State="Absent" Children="force"/>

These statements suppress or allow the installation of products from the office suite. Like when the state is set to local it will install the product & when it's set to absent it will not install the product form the suite.
Option State Id (for various Office products) used in the above statements can be found in Setup.xml file present in Office 2013 SP1 setup.

There's a Technet link which describe the Tags in detail. Link

These were few cool Tags which made my work easier.

Feel Free to Comment... Happy Troubleshooting !!