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I work for a company that owns about 30-40 laptops that we rent. I'm finally trying to implement a reimaging system so when the laptops come back from a rental, I can start fresh. The problem I'm running into is that Office needs to reactivate each time & the it's using the activation key from the original image. What's the easiest/best way to keep or restore the activation key for each machine as I move forward? Can I just back up the registry for each machine before I reimage it & then restore it after I put the image back on? I would think that would replace the registry settings & activation would no longer be an issue?
Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Hey - Sorry for the late reply.
Here is software which will allow you to backup and restore Office activation: [url=http://www.opa-backup.de/index_en.php:3d4sjhda]OPA-Backup[/url:3d4sjhda].
Please Note: I am making no recommendations, I have not checked nor tested this software. As far as I can tell it is free.
The registry backup and restore I believe would not work. Office activation also involves other files outside of the registry. Plus, restoring the registry from a well used operating system to a re-imaged OS would almost certainly create serious issues.
Cheers...Jim
Our rental inventory is about 30-40 PC laptops. They're spread out over 3 or 4 models with various OS & Office version. So far OPA-Backup looks promising. I emailed the guy who made it & here's what he said. I haven't had a chance to try it yet. I'm still open for suggestion too.
[i:3nip98e1]Hi Valentin,
I'm very excited to try OPA-Backup. Quick question that you may already know
the answer to.
I'm reimaging multiple machines from the same image. Each machine already
has a unique installation of Office however when I put the image back on it
will have the Office activation from the image host machine. This of course
is the wrong activation info. If I back up each machine with OPA-Backup,
will I be able to overwrite the activation once I'm done reimaging? My goal
is to have each machine with their own activation back on.
Thanks,
Hi,
yes, you will be able to overwrite the activation.
However, you must not run any Office application (e.g. Word, Excel) until you have recovered the unique backups. The OPA-Backup help file provides more detailed information on this topic (just press F1).
Thanks for using OPA-Backup!
Best regards,
Valentin Hauner
[/i:3nip98e1]
The other answer is using a site license on the laptops. I realize this wouldn't work for your situation, but for those looking to start down this path, buying site licenses (same serial number for multiple installs) makes imaging a breeze.
Also, for Office 2010 (not sure about 2007), you can opt to enter the serial number on first launch -- which allows you to image the machine and simply fire up Word after restoring the image and type in the correct serial number.
Jim Hillier
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