Change the Office 2007 CD Key

I had a situation where I had entered the office CD key for the wrong computer in the office onto another computer (I hate having 10 different license keys). When trying to activate I would get an error. My options were uninstall and reinstall, call Microsoft Support and have them laugh at me for being stupid or do the following steps below.

To change the office 2007 CD key follow these steps:

1. Make sure all Microsoft Office applications are closed.
2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
3. Navigate to the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration

   Note You may also find another subkey that resembles the following subkey:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{91120000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}

4. If you find additional subkeys that reference Microsoft 12.0 registration, open each subkey, and then identify the product by the ProductName entry.
   For example: ProductName=Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007
5. When you find the subkey for the product from which you want to remove the existing product license key, delete the following entries:
   • DigitalProductID
   • ProductID
6. Exit Registry Editor.

Now open up any of your Office 2007 applications and you will be prompted for a new product license key. Pop in the correct key and Click Continue then Install Now. After a short period of time Office will be reconfigured and you can reactivate Office.

Remotely enabling remote desktop

You can enable remote desktop on a Windows 2003 server machine remotely by completing the following steps:

Connect to the remote servers registry by Opening up the registry editor on your machine (Click Start -> Run -> type regedit and click ok) and clicking File -> Connect to Network Registry

Type in the remote servers name and click Ok.

Now navigate to the following key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server and change the fDenyTSConnections (REG_DWORD) from 1 (Remote Desktop disabled) to 0 (Remote Desktop enabled) as shown below.

On the servers I’ve done this to so far there was no reboot necessary. Though in your situation you may need to run shutdown -m \\remoteservername -r if you still cannot connect to your server after this has been done.

Redirecting Favorites using Group Policy

Windows Active Directory and group policy lets you easily redirect your users Desktop, My Documents folders, Start Menu and Application Data (although I would like to know why anyone would redirect the App data folder). But for some reason the users Favorites redirection was left out of these defaults.

I’m sure there are multiple ways to do this but the way I’ve accomplished this at many sites by doing the following:

Create a blank group policy and call it something like “favoritesredirection” and assign it to the user Organisational Unit you want redirection to occur.

Within your new policy navigate to  the User Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (Logon/Logoff) and double click on Logon from the right hand side.

Click on Show Files….

Now create the following files within this folder using something like notepad to do the editing as it doesn’t add any extra useless formatting:

A “favoritesredirection.bat” containing:

%systemroot%regedit /s favoritesredirection.reg

A “favoritesredirection.reg” file containing:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders]

“Favorites”=hex(2):25,00,48,00,4f,00,4d,00,45,00,44,00,52,00,49,00,56,00,45,00,
25,00,5c,00,46,00,61,00,76,00,6f,00,72,00,69,00,74,00,65,00,73,00,00,00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShell Folders]
“Favorites”=”\servernameHomefolders%username%_favorites”

The directory should look like this: 

Back on the “Logon Properties” window click on Add.

Type in favoritesredirection.bat (or browse and select favoritesredirection.bat) and click on Ok -> Ok and close out of the group policy object editor.