Office 2010 activation process in a terminal server environment

This week I was working with a customer on his Lotus Notes to Exchange migration project. Almost all of his users are working with Thin Clients on Citrix XenApp 5.0 terminal servers. All Citrix servers where deployed using Citrix Provisioning Services and Xen Server as a hypervisor.

He was going to install Outlook 2010 on his master image. The installation was running fine and he was going to change the product key for the Office 2010 activation. He typed in his product key which wasn't very good. From that point every user was asked to activate Outlook or change the product key. This occurred every time a user logged in after the terminal server was rebooted. We figured out that he has typed in his MAK key. When using a MAK key it is necessary to active Outlook for every user "manually" via internet or telephone.

After that I installed the Office 2010 Key Management Host Service on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. The Key Management Host for Office hast nothing to do with the Windows KMS service but can be installed on the same machine. You can download the program directly from the Microsoft website. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=97b7b710-6831-4ce5-9ff5-fdc21fe8d965

If you do like me and try to install the program on a Windows 2008 Server (the customer want me to use Windows 2008 Server, because he had no virtual template of a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. :-( ) you'll get the following error message.

Office 2010 Key Management Host Service can only be installed on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Windows KMS isn't that particular.

After you've started the installation of the KeyManagementServiceHost.exe you need to accept the typical Microsoft license agreement and the Office license files are automatically installed. You'll be prompted to enter your Office 2010 KMS Host Key which can be found in the Microsoft Licensing (VL) portal. It depends on your Microsoft contract. The Host Key is automatically activated if your machine has got internet access.

No need to type in something like –ipk and –ato as you need to do with the Windows Host Key and the slmgr.vbs script.

If the installation is done and the key is activated you can check the service status for Office with the following command:

cscript slmgr.vbs /dlv bfe7a195-4f8f-4f0b-a622-cf13c7d16864

If you want to see the status information from Windows and Office you can use:

cscript slmgr.vbs /dlv all

Since the introduction of KMS with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 there is a minimum activation threshold. That value is the necessary amount of client to start the activation process.

The minimum activation threshold for Office 2010 clients is 5. If you have less than 5 Office 2010 clients you need to use the MAK key for the activation. You can find more information here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ff603508(office.14).aspx

The initial grace period for Office 2010 is 25 days. If your Office 2010 is not activated after those 25 days you can still use your Office products without any limitation. All you see is a red bar on top of your product and a message box that tells you to activate your product or change the product key.

The Office KMS client key is integrated in the Office 2010 installation. There is no need to enter a KMS client key. But as I mentioned earlier in this post my customer accidently entered his MAK key on his terminal server master image. It was necessary to change the product key back to the KMS client key to activate Office against out Key Management Service Host. We don't want to install Office again!

How can we do that?

First of all we need the Office 2010 client key which can be found here:

This keys are public and can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ee624350.aspx

I DON'T POST ANY CUSTOMERS PRODUCT KEYS HERE! :-)

We need to change the product key back to the KMS client key now. This is done using the command below on my terminal server.

cscript ospp.vbs /inpkey:xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx

I set the Office Key Management Service Host to the FQDN of my server.

cscript ospp.vbs /sethst:KMShost.domain.int

And last but not least I was trying to activate Office with the following command.

cscript ospp.vbs /act

ospp.vbs can be found in the installation directory of Office. Normally it would be something like %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office14

Now you can check the activation request by using cscript slmgr.vbs /dlv bfe7a195-4f8f-4f0b-a622-cf13c7d16864 on the KMS server.

That should be it.

Have a nice weekend.

Chris