Re: How to find which Office Product Group an installation belongs

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Thank you for the helpful response.

Basically we have a licensing exercise running and with the tools we have it
is very difficult to differeniate what version of Office is installed on
machines. For instance consider the following scenario on three different
machines:

Office Professional 2003
Office Standard 2003 + Access 2003
Word 2003, Excel 2003, Powerpoint 2003, Outlook 2003, Access 2003 all
installed individually.

The end result is that the same applications are on each macine, but from a
licesning point of view they are different. We need to be able to tell which
group of Office applications are installed to match against what licenses we
have - at the moment with the tools at our disposal we can only tell which
individual applications are installed.

Any further clues would be most helpful.



"Beth Melton" wrote:

It's not stored in one specific location. That would be too easy. ;-) Each
Office version has their own Registration data in the Registry that includes
product names that can be used in the Help About. For example:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\<version>\Registration

Note that just because an application is listed that doesn't mean it is
installed or that the application is part of that version. There's a GUID
that is also associated with the application that is installed and is used
elsewhere in the Registry, such as in the Windows Installer content, such as
what is found under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData

This tracks the installed products, the install source and each uses the
GUID as a cross-reference. I can't tell you what Microsoft looks for
specifically, or how it connects everything (such as which keys are used
specifically) when presenting the About information -- I just know where the
bits and pieces are.

What are you trying to do exactly? Perhaps if we know more about what you
want we can provide some ideas. For example all you are trying to do is
determine which application was installed as part of which suite then I
believe there's at least one utility available that can provide this type of
information.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email cannot be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9801.aspx#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

"jmedd" <jmedd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:AB87FB18-0229-46CA-A711-FC7461859A68@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thank you. Could you please point me to the location within the registry
where it is stored?

"Beth Melton" wrote:

From the Registry, which is where Help About obtains its information.

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email cannot be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9801.aspx#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

"jmedd" <jmedd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:DA297A8A-33E8-4995-8921-15EDB40CCD7C@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Office Professional
Office Standard + Access
Individual Office Applications

There are obviously different flavours of Office you can install. If
you
view Help, About Microsoft Office Word for instance it gives you the
version
and on the second line down is either blank or tells you something
similar
to
the below:

"Part of Microsoft Office Professional Edition"

My question is how can you get this information without using Help,
About?
For instance if you view the properties of Word.exe it does not tell
you
whether it is part of Office Professional.








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