Pre-pidding an Office Web Apps Installation

If you have to install Office Web Apps on multiple servers in a SharePoint Farm and you use the GUI interface, one of the most annoying and time consuming steps is definitely having to enter the Product Key each time you perform an installation on each of the SharePoint servers in the farm.

Fortunately, Office Web Apps follows a similar file structure to the actual SharePoint media.  That is to say that they have store all of their configuration information in a Files directory directly on the root of the media and then are further subdivided into the various installation types such as Setup, SetupFarm, SetupFarmSilent and SetupSilent.

Within each directory is a single file called config.xml (just like SharePoint!!).  When you open up the config.xml file, you can edit the file and add the following element:

<PIDKEY Value="(Your Product Key)">



You can then save these individual config.xml files with this new element. Once this is saved, you can simply use an ISO editing tool such as UltraISO to save these files back to the Office Web Apps ISO media. (http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/03/slipstreaming-sharepoint-2010-easy-way.html)

Now when you install Office Web Apps on your SharePoint servers, you will no longer be prompted for the Office Web Apps Product Key!