Article ID: 2612800 - Last Review: November 8, 2011 - Revision: 5.0

Office 2010 SP1 installs SharePoint Workspace

View products that this article applies to.

System TipThis article applies to a different operating system than the one you are using. Article content that may not be relevant to you is disabled.

SYMPTOMS

Consider the following scenario:

You have a licensed installation of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010.
When you installed Office Professional Plus, you did not install the SharePoint Workspace 2010 program.
You install Office 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

In this scenario, SharePoint Workspace 2010 components are installed. A shortcut for SharePoint Workspace does not appear on your menu of programs. However, if you run \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Groove.exe, SharePoint Workspace 2010 starts and works correctly. Also, if you access a SharePoint 2010 site that supports workspaces, the Site Actions menu includes Sync to SharePoint Workspace.

If you were previously running Microsoft Office Groove 2007 together with Office 2010 programs, Groove 2007 is upgraded to SharePoint Workspace 2010. Because of changes in the Groove account, you will no longer be able to use the Groove account in Groove 2007.

Back to the top

CAUSE

Office 2010 SP1 provides an add-in tool API for creating custom tools for Groove workspaces. Because of a bug in the SP1 installation process, the addition of this API and of related functionality in Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) triggers an installation of SharePoint Workspace if SharePoint Workspace is not already present. (If SharePoint Workspace is present, it is just upgraded.) However, this installation does not occur if the licensed version of Office 2010 does not include the SharePoint Workspace component.

Back to the top

MORE INFORMATION

In most cases, this issue is harmless. However, it causes problems in two situations:

Enterprise installations for which you want to maintain a standardized environment
Installations over Groove 2007

For advice on how to minimize these issues, see one of the following sections, depending on your situation.

Back to the top

If you have not yet installed SP1

If your situation fits in one of the problem categories that are listed at the beginning of this section, do not install SP1 directly. Instead, download the SP1 package, open a support incident with Microsoft Customer Support, and then request escalation to the SharePoint Workspace team or to the Office Deployment team. These teams can give you a script to modify the downloadable SP1 package so that it does not install SharePoint Workspace.

Back to the top

If you have already installed SP1

If you have already installed the update and do not want to use SharePoint Workspace, you can just uninstall the component.

If you have already installed the update over Groove 2007, there is no supported way to downgrade. However, you may be able to recover. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

982777 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982777/ ) What to consider when you upgrade from Groove 2007 to SharePoint Workspace 2010

If you manage an enterprise installation in which you do not want to include SharePoint Workspace, you can create a special Config.xml file to turn off the feature silently after SP1 is installed. If you have many users who are already affected by this change with SP1, this would be the quickest way to safely disable SharePoint Workspace.

In the Config.xml file, add the following text:

</Configuration>

In this text, the placeholder ProductID represents the product ID for the actual Microsoft Office suite that you have installed. To find the product ID for your installation, look in the Setup.xml file. This file is located in the ProductName.WW folder. For example, the product ID for Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 is located in the following line in the ProPlus.WW\Setup.xml file:

From this line, you can verify that the product ID is ProPlus.

After you create the Config.xml file, you should run the Office Setup again by using the modify command option to modify your installation and the config command option to call the Config.xml file that you just created. To do this, run the following command:

"%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE14\Office Setup Controller\setup.exe" /modify ProductID /config "path\Config.xml"

In this command, replace the placeholder ProductID with the product ID, and replace the placeholder path with the path of the Config.xml file that you created.

Notes

Program icons will remain until the computer restarts.
Your Setup.exe file may be in a different location.

For more information about how to customize a deployed installation by using a Config.xml file, visit the following Microsoft TechNet website:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178956.aspx (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178956.aspx)

For more information about how to customize a deployed installation by using the Office Customization Tool (OCT), visit the following Microsoft TechNet website:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179141.aspx (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179141.aspx)

Note Currently, if you uninstall SharePoint Workspace, install a cumulative update (CU) over SP1, and then uninstall the CU, SharePoint Workspace will be reinstalled.

Back to the top