SCCM 2012 - Office Toolkit - Issues with Visio license - Workaround

First of all I struggled to get a proper name to the topic of this post... but anyway.. this post is all about the issues when deploying Visio sequenced with APP-V and other  Microsoft Office products. I don't know why but Visio has a different license model comparing to all other Microsoft Office products.

If you got to this post by chance, first read this post from the Microsoft App-V team blog to understand it correctly.

In order to deploy any Microsoft Office APP-V"ed" applications, first you must deploy the Microsoft Office Deployment Kit.

The recommendation is to include all the installation switches in one line when deploying it because as it is an application and applications in SCCM 2012 have detection methods, if you deploy it once it won't be deployed again.

So the first thing you would do is deploy it with the following command line:

msiexec /i OffVirt.msi  VISIOSTD=1 VISIOPRO=1

But there is a problem with this command line. Because Visio has a special license model any deployed Visio will always be licensed as the Professional version because it takes the highest version from the command line.

So imagine for example that you have sequenced Microsoft Project Standard 2010, Microsoft Office Visio Standard 2010 and Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2010 with APP-V.

You can't deploy different versions of Visio to the same computer.

But what if you want to deploy for example Project + Visio Standard or Project + Visio Professional?

If you have deployed Project to one machine you would have had to deploy Office Deployment Kit before and you had to specify everything that would be deployed in the command line switches. So if your command line was:

msiexec /i OffVirt.msi  PROJECTSTD=1 VISIOPRO=1

What about if you want to deploy Visio Standard? You would have to deploy the Office Toolkit again with different command line switches but you wouldn't be able to do so because of the detection methods.

Hopefully after all the explanation what I'm going to explain next is what you are looking for:

1. Edit the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit MSI using ORCA.
2. Go to the Property table and change the ProductVersion to 14.0.4763.1001
3. Create MST file named VisioPro.mst
4. Copy MST file to the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit source folder
5. Update DP

6. You should already have one Deployment Type for the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit application. Create another one (e.g. Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit for App-V – Visio Pro)

7. In the default Deployment Type use the following command line:

msiexec /i OffVirt.msi TRANSFORMS=OffVirt.Mst ADDLOCAL=OSpp,OSpp_Core,OSppWoW64 PROJECTSTD=1 VISIOSTD=1 (Change it to fit your environment)

8. In the Detecion Method tab use the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit MSI and select both versions. The default version and the modified version.

9. For the new Deployment Type use the following command line:

msiexec /fvomus OffVirt.msi TRANSFORMS=VisioPro.mst ADDLOCAL=OSpp,OSpp_Core,OSppWoW64 PROJECTSTD=1 VISIOPRO=1

10. In the Detection Method tab use the Microsoft Office 2010 Deployment Kit MSI as well but select only the new version to be detected

Now you can deploy any version of  APP-V"ed" Visio (provide you adapt the command line) in addition to other APP-V"ed" Office products.