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mittim12
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Immortal

XP and Office 2007

I'm looking for any feedback people can give that have implemented XP and Office 2007 in a VDI environment. What kind of challenges you may have faced and how the project turned out.

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TomHowarth
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the main issue I have with Office 2007 is that performace on XP is woeful. this is due to its "Search functionality" it got to the point that in a corporate environment I recommend Office 2K3 with Compatibility pack for XP and Office 2k7 only for Vista Desktops.

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Tom Howarth

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Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
mittim12
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Immortal

Thanks for the info Tom. This is exactly the type of information I am looking for and matches up with things I have heard already. Have you had a lot of sucess with using Vista and Office 2007 over VDI?

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MAHC
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I have had a similar experience as Tom and have stayed with 2k3 and the compatibility pack. Since performance was so poor at this time I am holding off on upgrading.

TomHowarth
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Leadership

Vista and Office2007 is fine. in fact Vista and Office2003 causes issues with performance !!! go figure.

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Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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MAHC
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I didnt forget to mention we are still a mostly XP shop still with testing of applications happening on Vista at this time. Good Luck. I am glad to hear that 2007 works good on vista.

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TomHowarth
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One thing to remember when you install Office2007 on a Vista VDI guest is to change the following Registry key.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search\Preferences

"PreventIndexingOutlook" = dword:00000001

This enables the classic Outlook Search features rather than the bloatware resource hog default Outlook Search.

Also once installed in the guest and prior to turning into a template

navigate to

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Common\UserInfo

and delete the values for

UserInitials and UserName.

This allows the logged on user to enter there personal details on first logon.

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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mittim12
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This is great information to have and I appreciate you sharing it. Hopefully more people will see this and share some of their experiences.

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mittim12
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Ok, I figure I would share my experiences in case anyone else ever has this question. We have done two beta pilots one with Office 2003 and one with Office 2007. This pilots were performed on the same ESX HW and the same backend storage. We also used the same set of users to pilot both scenerio. I don't have any of the hard numbers off hand but from a ESX view I seen a small increase in CPU utilization when using Office 2007, nothing big but non the less. The big clincher came from a user perception angle. The users complained of numerous problems in Office 2007 in relation to their typing being behind formatting taking a long time, and delays when moving between document and such. When we switched them over to the Office 2003 machines everything was great with no performance complaints at all. I will be digging deeper into the applicaiton side and trying to use some tools like VMsight and B-Hive's product to see if I can find out any additional info.

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TomHowarth
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Just out of curiosity did you have the regkeys I mentioned about set and was the Office2K7 on Vista or XP

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Tom Howarth VCP / VCAP / vExpert
VMware Communities User Moderator
Blog: http://www.planetvm.net
Contributing author on VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment
Contributing author on VCP VMware Certified Professional on VSphere 4 Study Guide: Exam VCP-410
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mittim12
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Tom, both Office 2007 and Office 2003 were run on a XP machine. I wasn't able to do the reg keys you specified only because the Office 2007 beta of the project was done before I started the thread, though we did disable the search functionality during the testing. In the event the 2003 performance holds up I will present the reg changes to the OS team as one of the things to tweak.

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