Deploy the Office 2007 compatibility pack via Group Policy

It seems that this blog is going to transform itself into a Windows-related blog, but that’s normal since Windows is so much more complicated to manage than Linux/FreeBSD… :P

Anyway, this is a neat feature if yours users start asking you “someone sent me a new Word 2007 (or Excel 2007) attachment and I cannot open it!”. The first answer should and it has to be: “talk to this person and tell him/her to save again the document in Word 2003 DOC format”, or “start using OpenOffice and true open standards and free use from this PITA!”. Then, you can go to download the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibilty Pack (for Office 2003) exe file in your local language, save it to a temporary location and from cmd.exe issue

FileFormatConverters.exe /extract:C:\temp_dir

this trick will create in C:\temp_dir the .msi file you can use to deploy the package through a normal GPO software installation.