Do you remember when you were a kid and you first found out the secret of how a magician pulled off a trick and were let down? That's it? Slight of hand? A little disappointing to say the least, well that is unfortunately how I felt after being so excited about Citrix taking matters into their own hands to help the slow activating of Office in a PVS environment. I thought to myself, wow, they must have gotten together with Microsoft and uncovered the secret sauce on what is going on. They probably added in some deeply buried code to the PVS software itself to force the activation.
Unfortunately, it is no where near as exciting as that. If you don't want to read any further, I completely understand :-)
For all those still with me, here goes. Clicking the Accelerated Activation checkbox, will automatically activate a script on the image to be run at Machine startup that simply runs the Office Activation command CSCRIPT OSPP.VBS. This is something that I have been doing myself for probably years now and is certainly nowhere near as sexy as the checkbox looks.
The way Citrix is getting this to run is via local Group Policy Machine startup script. There is a possibility that this may not even work for those of you who have the setting to override the local GPO's for the Domain ones, but no biggie you can easily do this yourself without Citrix help. Since learning what this actually does, I have taken to unchecking the box and handling on my own.
Here is the full reveal:
... and there you have it. At least I still don't understand how Copperfield can float across the Grand Canyon!
Aaron