The Wonderful Wizard of ORK

Here's a quick quiz. The Office Profile Wizard in the Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit (ORK) is a tool to:

Sorry, that was a bit of a trick question. If you answered j. All of the above, you were almost correct. Although the word Profile is in its name, the Office Profile Wizard can't create Outlook mail profiles. (To create mail profiles, you should use ORK's Custom Installation Wizard or Custom Maintenance Wizard.) The Office Profile Wizard can do everything else on the list, which is a lot more than you might expect.

The Office Profile Wizard creates or processes an .ops file that contains information about the files in a user's Windows profile folders and registry settings gleaned from an existing Office installation. The more I explore the Office Profile Wizard, the more I think that all Exchange administrators and Help desk staff should consider adding it to their toolkits. To show you why, let's explore the conventional uses of the Office Profile Wizard and some more unconventional uses. Although this article specifically discusses the Office 2003 version of the Office Profile Wizard, most of the information applies to earlier versions as well.

You can download ORK from the Office 2003 Resource Kit Downloads page (http://www.microsoft.com/office/orkarchive/2003ddl.htm). After you download and run the ork.exe file to install the ORK tools, you'll see the Office Profile Wizard on the All Programs menu under Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit. You can also locate it under \program files\orktools\ork11\tools\profile wizard as proflwiz.exe.

Proflwiz.exe is not only part of ORK but also part of Office 2003. However, proflwiz.exe appears to the Office user as the Save My Settings Wizard and not the Office Profile Wizard. That's right—the Office Profile Wizard and the Save My Settings Wizard are the same application. The user will see the Save My Settings Wizard on the All Programs menu under Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard.

Conventional Uses
Administrators most often use the Office Profile Wizard to gather settings from a user's existing Office installation, whereas users most often use the Save My Settings Wizard to perform a general backup of their Office settings and data. If needed, users can later restore the settings and data by running the Save My Settings Wizard again.

Using the Office Profile Wizard is one of several different ways available in the Custom Installation Wizard to include various files and registry settings in an Office deployment. The Custom Installation Wizard (which is also on the All Programs menu under Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit) is Microsoft's main tool for building the options for an initial Office deployment. The procedure for using the Office Profile Wizard to gather and import the settings is simple:

1. Install Office (or just Outlook or any combination of Office programs) on a machine.
2. Configure the different application settings you want to include in the deployment.
3. Run the Office Profile Wizard to generate an .ops file. As Figure 1 shows, you can choose the applications for which you want to save the settings. The settings include registry changes as well as file additions and removals. The .ops file's settings will be part of the deployment unless they're superseded by other settings applied later in the Custom Installation Wizard deployment process.
4. Import the .ops file, as Figure 2 shows.

The operation of the Save My Settings Wizard is even simpler. As Figure 3 shows, the user has only two options—one option to save settings and another to restore settings.

Both the Office Profile Wizard and the Save My Settings Wizard let you apply settings that were previously saved to an .ops file. The .ops file is a binary file, so ORK includes the OPS File Viewer. This viewer extracts information from the binary file, converts and stores that information in a text file that has an .out file extension, then displays that text file in Notepad. You can find the OPS File Viewer on the All Programs menu under Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit. You can also find it under \program files\orktools\ork11\tools\viewers as opsview.exe.

How the Wizard Works
Proflwiz.exe determines what settings to save or restore by looking at an .ini file. The Office Profile Wizard comes with two .ini files, whereas the Save My Settings Wizard comes with only one .ini file. When you run the Office Profile Wizard from the ORK folder, proflwiz.exe invokes the opw11adm.ini file, which is in the same folder as proflwiz.exe. When a user runs the Save My Settings Wizard, proflwiz.exe invokes the opw11usr.ini file in the \program files\microsoft office\office11 folder. That folder also contains a prebuilt reseto11.ops file.

Each .ini file includes a number of sections, all documented with comments (i.e., lines that begin with #) in the file itself. The [Header] section specifies the product and version. This section is followed by seven sections to back up or remove folders and files and 12 sections to back up or remove registry values. The online Office Profile Wizard documentation (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/ha011513701033.aspx) explains all the sections. The documentation also provides proflwiz.exe's command-line switches. Table 1 highlights those switches used specifically to save and restore Outlook settings.

To start proflwiz.exe from ORK with a custom .ini file and generate a new .ops settings file, you'd run the command

"C:\program files\orktools ork11\tools\profile wizard proflwiz.exe" /s 
mycustomfile.ops
/i mycustomfile.ini

where mycustomfile.ops is the file you want to create and mycustomfile.ini is your custom .ini file. (Although this command appears on several lines here, you'd enter it on one line at a command prompt. The same holds true for the other multiline commands in this article.)

If you want to restore the settings saved in an .ops file, you'd use the /r switch instead of the /s switch to start proflwiz.exe on the user's machine:

"C:\program files\microsoft office\office11\proflwiz.exe"
  /r"\\servername\office_admin  ops\mycustomfile.ops" /q

The /q switch makes this a quiet installation. In other words, the user won't see any prompts. Note that in this example, the .ops file resides on a network share and is invoked with a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) filename.