remote editing of Office 2000 key?

[Mr. K]

Hi,

Is there a way to change the CD key for Office 2000 after it's installed? We have 400 machines from a different organization merged into ours, and they won't accept the Office 2000 media we have. It's the same version (2000 Professional) but a different key.

I don't want to have to reinstall Office 2000 just to update the CD key. This website suggests I can rename a particular registry entry and Office will prompt for a new CD key--would it be possible to do this over the network and automated for 400 machines?

Any other ideas?

Thanks for your time...

 

[Un4gIvEn1]

What you may be dealing with is either your corp or the other corp used a OLA version and the other used Retail. Here's the bottom line. If you did not purchase the licenses from the company and you do not have enough licenses to install versions on all of the other PCs, then you are out of compliance. You don't want to get M$ on your back...

 

[Mr. K]

I do believe the machines are on an NT domain (I don't know the full details yet--I just got word of the project today). If that's the case, we can probably make use of Group Policy. What I'm not sure of is whether the logon script can not only rename the registry key, but also enter the new one. From what I infer from the MS support article, the user has to manually enter the key...

Both organizations have full corporate licences for MS Office. It's not so much a licensing issue (we just had an audit a few months ago... ) but different kinds of media we have--there's MS Office for OEM, retail, MSDN... I've run into the problem with the keys before, but never on the scale of 400 machines. Before I've just reinstalled Office with the new key, but that's hardly possible in this case.

Thanks for your attention, guys!

 

[Mr. K]

I've only had a quick look at MS's instructions. I think it calls for renaming/deleting a particular registry key which in turns causes Office to prompt for a new CD key.

So a logon script can take care of renaming/deleting the existing registry entry, but I'm still unsure if I can use the script to enter the new CD key (directly into the registry) or if the user has to enter it manually.

The instructions call for renaming the registry entry, then restarting Office; at that point, the user will be prompted for a new CD key. From what I infer, I can use the logon script to input a new registry key, but the MS website doesn't say whether I can input the new key directly into the registry or if it must be inputted manually (at a user prompt).

 

[Mr. K]

All this will really help next week when the project gets underway. I'll play around with RegProt and do a number of test cases... I don't want to risk corrupting the registries on 400 machines.

Thank you very much!