Office V.x serial numbers - moving, changing, reading

[Peter Bako]

I have been working for a small Macintosh based company, with about 90% of
their users still on Office V.x. Before I came along they did not keep any
kind of a log or track as to which copy of Office was installed onto which
machine. During initial installation of systems this was not a problem
(since they just used the number that was purchased with the system), but
now that this connection is lost and machines are needing to be reinstalled
we are getting quite a few cases of duplicate serial numbers.

Poking around this list and on the 'net via Google, I have found that by
deleting the file "Carbon Registration Database", "Office Registration Cache
X", and "Microsoft Office Settings (10)" I can change the number of Office.
Furthermore by saving these files before reformatting a machine and then
putting it back in the same place I can in effect "move" the serial number
from system to system.

However I am also trying to come up with a master list where I link each
computer's serial number to an Office serial number. The problem is that I
have no way of figuring out which Office license number was used on which
machine, since Office never displays the full serial number, the number that
it generates is not consistent to the serial number originally entered and I
cannot read the contents of these three office files.

So, is there any way to somehow read from an installed copy of Office which
serial number it was installed with?

Thanks,
Peter

 

[JE McGimpsey]

So, is there any way to somehow read from an installed copy of Office which
serial number it was installed with?

AFAIK, it's a one-way hash with no way of getting the serial number from
the Office installation.

One can reassign serial numbers if it's necessary:

http://www.mcgimpsey.com/macoffice/office/pid.html

 

[Morten Dreier]

So, is there any way to somehow read from an installed copy of Office which
serial number it was installed with?

Not that I know of.
A common way to work around this is to use the built-in firewall in OSX
and block the version-checking from happpening - thus allowing you to
only use one number. You can make a script that looks like this and is
run wvery time the machine starts:

#!/bin/bash
sudo ipfw add 02222 deny udp from any to any 2222 out
sudo ipfw add 02222 deny tcp from any to any 2222 out
sudo ipfw add 02222 deny udp from any to any 2222 in
sudo ipfw add 02222 deny tcp from any to any 2222 in
sudo ipfw add 02223 deny udp from any to any 3464 out
sudo ipfw add 02223 deny tcp from any to any 3464 out
sudo ipfw add 02223 deny udp from any to any 3464 in
sudo ipfw add 02223 deny tcp from any to any 3464 in


Another solutions, of course, is to upgrade to a multi-user license. The
multi-user versions have "one serial to rule them all"