Last time I posted to this blog, as two activation methods for the enterprise. The same KMS host running on Windows Server 2008 R2, volume editions of Windows 7, or Windows Server 2003 can activate both Windows and Office, for example. Your end-user does not need to know anything about activation because everything is happening behind-the-scenes. End-User Notification Experience For volume editions of Office, users will not see any reminders to activate the first 25 days after installation. However, if activation is not successful, then users will see notification dialogs every time they launch an Office application from day 25 to 30 post-installation. An example of these notification dialogs is shown below. If the user closes the dialog, he or she will still be able to fully use all the features in Office. If Office still has not been activated 30 days after installation, users will see notification dialogs every time an Office application is started. In addition, the title bar color will change to red as shown below. These visual indicators serve as reminders that users need to activate. How to Quickly Set Up a KMS Host If users are seeing the above notifications to activate, you can set up a KMS host in just minutes by following the directions on the. Once the KMS host is set up, the KMS clients automatically find the host on DNS and activate themselves against it. This is transparent to the end-user. That way the KMS client requests can get through to the KMS host. If you are running Windows Server 2008, consider using a VM of Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2003 as your KMS host. The Microsoft KMS host is handling all of our internal Windows AND Office 2010 activation requests. We add the KMS servers to the security group as part of the standard KMS build process. Also part of the standard KMS build process we request an IPsec exemption for the servers, because we allow our unmanaged clients labs, non-domain joined, etc to activate. Keep in mind ospp. Richard Moloney, the developer of this script, says a useful benefit after setting up a KMS host is using the -act and -dhistory commands to verify the Office client is finding the KMS host and successfully activating. You can easily get the error description with this command specifying the error code: cscript ospp. Just provide the computer name and login credentials: cscript ospp. Volume Activation Management Tool VAMT 2. If you are managing Windows XP machines running Office 2010, see for more information. Both have Windows Vista and Office 2010 applications installed. On my laptop, I have the MAK key installed from the. If I right click on my computer name, I can install product keys, trigger activation, or even do proxy activation through VAMT 2. Proxy activation is a method of activating multiple machines with Office 2010 that have a MAK key installed. This would be helpful for computer networks that are not connected to the Internet, or if you want to MAK activate multiple machines at once for your sales team, for example. If you have any questions, check out the. If you have any specific questions, post it to our forum at and our team will do our best to address them! Hi I am sooooo frustrated. I evidently purchased my new computer Dell Inspiron without Microsoft Office. I like using Outlook and would like to install it in the new computer. Click ok to try again or enter…. What am I doing wrong? I would appreciate any assistance with this. I did not see a cost for the download. What is it please. Thanks you VERY much. I agree with Starterweb, that I would have appreciated a lot, if you ospp. I agree, that it is necessary to be able to distinguish between these two tools, but I believe, that it is already enough, that the tools have two different names: ospp. Would you accept a Design Change Request on the parameters for ospp. Well, this is too confusing. Every set of command is now different although their functions remain same. The new set of definitions will only bring difficulty to anyone that has to maintain both Windows and Office volume systems. The major advantage of keeping the same parameter names would be consistency with slmgr. The major disadvantage would be confusion between the two scripts. As you know, slmgr. The only way to configure Office clients would be through ospp. One example could be the -ato Windows or -act Office command. If they were the same, users may be running -ato multiple times but wonder why Office is not activating. There are pros and cons for keeping the same parameter names or having different ones. However, we believe that the benefit of the overhead with different parameter names outweighs the potential confusion caused by having the same parameter names. I hope this gives you better understanding of why it was designed this way. Well, you are the rule designer. You set it and we use it. Beau The Key Management Service KMS for Office 2010 will be supported on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2003. Support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista will not be available for Office 2010. Activation method for products obtained through the academic programs will be no different than other volume or retail products. For example, if you get the Professional Plus or Standard SKUs, these are volume editions that use KMS or MAK activation. If you get the Professional SKU, that will require activation online with Microsoft or telephone activation. What is the minimum number of activation attempts required before KMS will begin activating Office 2010? At this point, our KMS activates only operating systems. We used one KMS activation key for Server 2008 R2 that allows activations for everything from Vista to 2008 R2. Now that KMS will be used to also activate other products, will there be separate activation keys for Office, SharePoint, Windows, etc? Tommy At least five different machines physical or virtual will need to contact the Office KMS host for activation before the machines become activated. Note this is different than Windows client 25 machines. If you have an existing KMS host running WS 2003, volume editions of W7, or WS 2008 R2 , then that KMS host can start activating Office too after you run KeyManagementServicehost. This exe will install the license files to recognize the Office KMS host key, prompt you for the KMS host key, and activate. This KMS host will be able to activate all volume editions of Office 2010 client software, in addition to activating Windows. SharePoint and Office server products do not require activation. Please go to this site to download the exe and get an Office Beta KMS host key: Note there will be an updated exe for RTM, which will contain RTM license files. You will be able to run it on your existing KMS host. You may then enter your RTM Office KMS host key at that time. Gino There is no tool currently for the Office 2010 Beta, but the final version of Office 2010 will ship with a tool called ospprearm. Restart and freeze the grace timer 2. When the image is deployed and the KMS client requests activation for the first time, a CMID will then be generated. If we used the same parameters, and users expected the same behavior between slmgr. Hi Ted, Great article but my issue is this. I have a Mac with boot camp and a legal copy of Office 2010 for Work. For CPU intensive work I log in to boot camp, for all other tasks I use VMWare fusion, every time I access an Office product from the alternate source Bootcamp then VMWare I get prompted to re-activate the product. The decision to allow OS activation on a 2008 KMS but not to support Office activation was also PITA for us. That descision makes no sense at all.
