We have purchased some copies of Office 2013 Home & Business for County users that don't need MSAccess. We installed the first couple by downloading from the Internet. Works OK, but is too slow for us. All our older versions of Office can be installed from a share on the network, so I tried to set this up. I found where I could download the installation files for a cd. I downloaded them and put them on the server. However, when I tried to install from the server, I would get a message "Something went wrong". It turns out that it runs fine from a cd, but not the server.
My research turned up that I have Click-to-Run installation files. I inquired with Microsoft and they said that there's no .MSI available for Home & Business. So I did more research and found that using the Office Deployment Tool (ODT), I should be able to accomplish what I want. I customized the configuration.xml, then used the ODT /download option and downloaded the files into a share. However, when I try to use /configure to install the software on a client, it would start telling me that various files where missing from c:\program files\microsoft office 15\clientx64. Everything I read pointed to pre-existing Office issues and the fix was to delete subkeys from the registry and try again. My test computer is a newly rebuilt Win 7 box with no Office installed. Tried the registry keys anyway, but still got the message. So, I extracted the files into the directory. (Doesn't make sense that I should have to do that.) I no longer get the message, but now the install hangs at 11% and doesn't go any further.
Obviously, I'm not understanding something about how this is to work. Microsoft's documentation on the Internet seems to consist of numerous articles that all point to one another, rather than one place that properly explains everything. Can someone help me figure out where my logical disconnect is happening? Thank you.
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