Rearm the Office 2013 installation

  • Article

 

Applies to: Office 2013

Summary: How to rearm an Office 2013 KMS installation for an image.

Audience: IT Professionals

There is a 25-day grace period from the time of installation of Key Management Service (KMS) clients before notifications to activate are displayed to the user. If you want to deploy an image, you must rearm your Office 2013 installation before you capture the image. If you do not rearm, users see notification dialog boxes at the time that the image is deployed, instead of 25 days after deployment. The 25-day grace period gives ample time for a KMS host to be found and activation to succeed. If activation is successful, users do not see notifications to activate.

Rearm the Office installation

Rearming does the following important tasks:

  • Resets the grace timer to 30 days.

  • Freezes the grace timer until either an Office application is run, or the ospp.vbs script is run.

  • Resets the client computer ID (CMID). This is important because the KMS host uses the CMID to determine the number of unique clients. To check the CMID, use the command ospp.vbs /dcmid. For more information about ospp.vbs, see The ospp.vbs script.

    Note

    If you run this command on either Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, it only returns to CMID for Windows, not Office. To see the CMID for Office 2013, look for event 12288 in the Application Event log as shown in this Office deployment support team blog article.

Rearm is also recommended for MAK deployment. If you are deploying Office 2013 that is configured for MAK activation, and you do not remotely activate for end-users through VAMT or ospp.vbs, users see an activation dialog box the first time that an Office 2013 application starts. The activation dialog box is slightly different 25 days after installation. Also, users might immediately see a red title bar warning them of activation issues if Office 2013 was not rearmed before image capture.

To rearm your Office installation

  1. Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure has the following credentials:

    • The user account that performs this procedure is a member of the Administrators group on the KMS host computer.

  2. Close all Office 2013 applications.

  3. Open a command prompt with administrative permissions.

  4. Go to %installdir%\%Program Files%\Microsoft Office\Office15. If you installed the 32-bit edition of Office 2013 on a 64-bit operating system, %Program Files% is the Program Files (x86) folder.

  5. At the command prompt, type ospprearm.exe. If the rearm succeeds, the following message displays: “Microsoft Office rearm successful.”

    Note

    You can rearm five times, unless you activate Office by using a KMS host. If you run out of rearms, activating by using a KMS host lets you rearm once.

  6. Capture the image or save the virtual computer. For more information about how to capture the image, see Configure Office 2013 for a hard disk image.

    Important

    Do not open an Office application or run ospp.vbs, or do anything else related to Office 2013 while the image is being captured. Otherwise, the grace timer starts.

See also

Plan volume activation of Office 2013
Tools to manage Office 2013 volume activation

Volume Activation Management Tool Technical Reference