hi again
thanks for your reply.
I went through the article you sent me about independent MAK activation. There are a few reasons why our model breaks after Microsoft decides to use the geographically optimized activation. To understand why I will lay out our architecture based on the old
activation model:
I built a win7 32 bit image for our laptops/desktops with office 2010; when the image deploys, office 2010 installs by itself, then at some point a batch file fires this command
start /wait cscript "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /act
the MAK key is already in the office 2010 installation kit in the config.xml file
when the command is executed, in the past, the computer would talk directly with Microsoft's servers on the internet and the activation would be successful.
another aspect of our infrastructure is that we have 2 types of locations: the major offices without internet access and some brach offices with internet access;
the activation model worked well in the past for the branch offices
it also worked for the major offices because knowing the exact ip addresses of Microsoft's servers we opened our corporate firewall to allow access. We all know, the firewall is a useful thing for security reasons. If we don't know the exact ip anymore we
would need to open the firewall for the whole internet which renders the firewall and the whole security concept futile.
now, back to your suggestion: independent activation or proxy activation using the VAMT tool;
this would work but only manually; the whole idea of an image to be deployed on laptops/desktops is to make it as much automatic as possible with the least manual intervention required.
is there a proxy activation mechanism, in other words to designate a server of our own to talk to Microsoft or Akamai automatically when polled by incoming requests from computers for office 2010 activations ?
also, is the a way to maintain the automation for the branch offices ? in other words, if the answer to the question above is yes, then wouldn't that break the activation process for the branch offices which are on the internet and whose computers would
try to get into the corporate network to talk to the proxy activation server ? in other words is there a way to avoid having to create different images just for the reason of different office 2010 activation mechanisms ?
thanks