Office 2008, stopping the setup assistant for each user.

This solution is meant for large deployments of Microsoft Office 2008.  This solution is assuming that you are re-directing the office preference files for a user.  You would redirect these files if you were using Network Homes on an OSX server or you wanted to specify settings for users with Mobile Accounts.  

If you want to stop Setup Assistant from running each time a user logs in....I had that too, really annoying.  If you check out the ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist you will see an entry for Completing the SetupAssistant.  I am now pushing this plist file out to all users, via WorkGroup Manager so they are not asked for the setup assistant anymore.  It works great now....

If you are wondering how I am browsing my plists for freely I am using a program called PlistEditPro.  I don't know how originally told me about this software, but it is AWESOME!!!  I am sending out more and more plist files to my users and this program really lets me edit and browse my plist files before I even get to WGM.  There is a free version of the software. http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/plisteditpro/

Office 2008 receiving blank pages when launching documents.

This solution is intended for large deployments of Office 2008.  For a home user, just throw away any of the files mentioned and they will be recreated the next time you launch any of the Office 2008 applications.  However, if you are managing hundreds/thousands of machines, this is how you can handle it.  

I use NHR to redirect....  (NHR can be downloaded from: http://jochsner.dyndns.org/scripts/NHR.html)

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data

I use WorkGroup Manager to control....
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.PowerPoint.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist


Even with doing these redirects I had a few users with this blank page problem.  I went into the ~/Library/Preferences folder and removed any com.microsoft preference (there were about ten of them from when the user used Office 2004f) and the com.Office preference file.

When I logged out and logged back in again, I haven't had the problem again on the user.

Reason to start this blog....

Apple's product line changes so rapidly, that technical resources are many times slow to follow, if at all.  Due to this fact, I have been getting most of my technical advice from other users in the field.  I have started this blog in order to communicate and share my experiences with Apple's products, specifically client and server within a K-12 environment.  

During the month of June of this year, I converted 28 servers from OS 10.4 to OS 10.5.  I have been testing for this conversion since November 2007 when I received my copies of Leopard from Apple.  In fact, I presented a hands-on session at MacWorld 2008 in January on OSX Leopard Server for Education.  Of course, all goes well during testing.  In the real world, I have 1 master and 25 replicas, the other servers are stand alone serving different purposes.  I can test one master and one replica in a test environment, but I was not able to test the load with all 25 replicas.  

From here on out I would like to document what my experiences were with the conversion from 10.4 to 10.5.  I will also be technically committing on other issues or items that I address from here on out.