Office 2010 OCT and Outlook Settings

 

We’ve had a few issues with mail profiles having wonky issues of various types. The only solution seemed to be to wipe out the mail profile and let it be automatically recreated upon reopening Outlook (2010). Although we had always used “modify profile” under Office 2007, Yoni Kirsh over at Fastrack Technology advised choosing “new profile” for a clean slate:

Ok, so it was easy enough to change that setting in the OCT and save my MSP back for any future deployment with SCCM. However, what about the Office 2010 install in my base images I use for OSD?

I stumbled upon a TechNet doc that provides a nifty VBS for “converting” your OCT-generated MSP into XML to see what it’s doing. I was hoping this would tell me where in the registry this setting was stored: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179027

This is the bit that’s pertinent to Outlook:

As I compared the XML output from my 2007 install vs. my 2010 (updated) MSP, the only difference in this section was the customizationOption=”3.” It was “2″ on one and “3″ on the other. Hmmm…I could see the different setting, but it still didn’t tell me where it was storing that value in the registry.

After a bit more searching, I discovered something in the root of the “Microsoft Office” folder in the file system called custom14.prf. TechNet held more answers: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179062.aspx. Aha, what I thought was held in the registry all this time was actually saved in a settings file. All I had to do now was use notepad to view both the old 2007 PRF and the PRF generated with the updated MSP on a fresh Office 2010 install.  The secret sauce was in the first section under “Profile Defaults:”

With this information in hand, I used DISM to mount my base images, edit the custom14.prf, make the appropriate changes, save, commit changes to the WIM, and voila! Outlook changes now reflected for all users in the future.

Thanks again to Yoni Kirsh at Fastrack Technology for pointing me in the right direction