Disclaimer

What follows is a discussion on how to install the International Character Toolbar (ICT) for all users on a PC running Office 2003. The information has been gleaned from the WIX source code for the MSI installer and a general knowledge of how Office add-ins are regsitered. This solution has not been tested. Use it at your own risk!

Introduction

By default ICT only installs for the current user. This wasn't a specific policy decision; it's just the way the installer was developed and it didn't get changed by the time we released it (May 2005).

I've received a request on how to easily make ICT available for all users on a PC without each user having to install it.

How Office-Addins Are Registered

Each Office application (Word, Excel etc.) has a registry key that lists the add-ins that are to be used. Word stores its list of add-ins at SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins and PowerPoint at SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\PowerPoint\Addins. Each add-in then appends it's Component Object Model (COM) programmatic id to the registry path. Under the resulting key it stores some values that identifies the add-in, how the hosting Office application should load it etc. Under which hive all this is stored, determines whether or not the add-in is available to only a single user (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) or to all users (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE).

To put all this in context for ICT, the registry key created by the setup for the current user is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\ACT.Connect and the values stored are: FriendlyName, Description, LoadBehaviour and CommandLineSafe.

How To Make It Available for All Users

NOTE: You will need to have Administrative privileges on the local machine for this to work!

  1. Logon to a machine and install ICT
  2. For a command prompt, run regedit.exe
  3. Locate the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\ACT.Connect
  4. Right click on the key and choose Export. Save the file somewhere.
  5. Load the file just created into Notepad
  6. Replace [HKEY_CURRENT_USER with [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  7. Save the file
  8. Open an Explorer window and double click the file. Answer Yes (or OK) to the prompt.

To test this has worked, logon to the machine as a differnet user (who never had ICT installed) and start Word. The ICT toolbar should appear.

To make this work for PowerPoint, replace Office\Word\Addins in step 3 with Office\PowerPoint\Word

This solution is a bit quick and dirty and doesn't scale well to repeating on lots of machines. One way to install on lots of machines at the same time, would be to save the file created in step 7 somewhere on your network and have the network's logon script run it.