Manual Removal of Office 2010 during Unattended 2013 install

Question

As I'm sure it has been discussed many times before, the Office 2013 OCT deployment does a horrible job removing all Office 2010 components properly.  Even with the option to "remove previous versions of Office before installing" selected,
there will still be pieces of Office 2010 lingering behind.  It has been reported to me by our support department that this can randomly cause issues with Office 2013.
In these cases, our support group must manually remove the Office 2010 remnants and run a manual repair of Office 2013. Not ideal on 1000 systems.
To bypass all of this mess, I've attempted to add a command line via the Office Config Tool to remove Office 2010 as well as Lync 2010.  I have configured OCT to Run a batch file
before installing Office2013 via the "Add installations and run programs" area.  The batch file has 2 lines.
\\<server>\<share>\Office2010\Install\setup.exe /uninstall ProPlus /config \\<server>\<share>\silentuninstall.xml
\\<server>\<share>\Lync2010\LyncSetup.exe /silent /uninstall
Nothing too fancy here.  Note that this batch file works as intended if I manually run it from command line on a workstation. So, I know that all of these commands are good.  Also note, the sms installer account has access to the server and
shares specified in my commands.
This seems like it should be such an easy thing for OCT to pull off, but it just blows right by my batch file as if it doesn't exist. Am I missing something here?  What can I do in OCT to ensure that it doesn't ignore this command?
Thanks,
David

Answer 1

I've seen this sort of query quite a few times over the past few months. The Office 2013 OCT tool does a fairly poor job removing previous Office versions.
Your uninstall argument is probably failing because your referencing an xml file that resides on a server file share. Config Manager will execute your argument using the system account so its probably a permissions based issue. You can test this by running
your uninstall argument using psexec which replicates this behavior.
I've approached this issue in a different way - you may wish to look at this option instead?
Microsoft have written some Office scrub vb script files to address the issue:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/odsupport/archive/2011/04/08/how-to-obtain-and-use-offscrub-to-automate-the-uninstallation-of-office-products.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/odsupport/archive/2011/04/06/how-to-perform-an-uninstall-upgrade-to-office-2010.aspx
http://marckean.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/fully-automate-removal-of-any-version-office-in-preparation-for-office-365/
You could  use a batch file wrapper as your Office 2013 Configuration Manager install command – something like this would work:
@echo off
SET INSTALL=%~dp0
:Remove Microsoft Office 2010 Suites
Cscript “%INSTALL%\OffScrub10.vbs” ALL /Quiet /NoCancel
:Install Microsoft Office 2013 Professional
Setup.exe
ping 127.0.0.1 -n 5 > nul
Has worked well for me. Note that you would need to add an additional line to remove Lync 2010 - probably something like msiexec /x {YourLync2010GUID} /q would be best.
Cheers
Damon