I'm having a difficult issue with installing Office 2016 using the Office Deployment Tool (ODT). The problem is compounded by the fact that I can't see any way to get information about what ODT is actually doing - it simply gives this vague status message, and no other information beyond error messages (and I've extracted as much relevant info from those as I can).
We're getting things ready
According to this MS blog article from 2010, for earlier versions of Office it was possible to enable "Verbose logging" for their installers:
The first thing to do when troubleshooting Office install failures is to ensure that MSI verbose logging is enabled. In Office 2007/2010 there is a setup.exe log file that gets created by default, but it does not give the amount of detail that is usually required to diagnose an installation failure. With verbose MSI logging enabled we will get a verbose log file for each component that Office 2007/2010 installs. We will have a verbose log for the install of the Word component, one for Excel, and so on.
To enable verbose logging you will want to set the following registry keys.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer]
"Debug"=dword:00000007
"Logging"="voicewarmup"
However, this is specific to the old installation procedure which appears to have been per application ("a verbose log for the install of the Word component, one for Excel, and so on"), whereas my understanding is that ODT (introduced with Office 2013) installs them all as one.
Is there anything like this that allows verbose logging, or any other form of debugging, for installs using the Office Deployment Tool with Office 2016?
Answer
It turns out logging settings for ODT is controlled by the Configuration.xml config file, which toggles between Off
and Standard
logging.
From the reference for the config xml, the default is Standard logging, saved to %TEMP%.
I had trouble finding the relevant logs there, so I got easier-to-use results by creating a log
folder in the folder I was using for ODT and adding the following to my config file, below the
but outside the
:
The log files themselves have a filename with no reference to ODT (hence my problems finding them in %TEMP%
), of format PCNAME-DATESTAMP-TIMESTAMP
for example MYPC-20151120-1330
.
Here's an example of a complete configuration that worked for me, including the logging config, so you can see more easily where it goes:
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