How to: Change the Installation Path of an Office Solution
The Publish Wizard and the Publish page of the Project Designer create a ClickOnce Setup program for your solution. During the publishing process, you can specify the final deployment location for the Setup program, where end users will go to install the solution. This location is called the installation path in the wizard and the Installation Folder URL on the Publish page. This path makes it possible for the application manifest to check for updates. For more information about publishing, see Publishing Office Solutions by Using ClickOnce.
Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects and application-level projects for Microsoft Office 2013 and Microsoft Office 2010. For more information, see Features Available by Office Application and Project Type.
Reasons for Changing the URL of a Setup Program
You can add or change the installation path after you publish a solution. There are several reasons you might want to change the installation path:
The installation path was not known when the Setup program was compiled.
The solution files have been copied to a different location.
The server that has the installation files has a new name or location.
In these cases, anyone who has administrator permissions on the network can change the installation path of an Office solution.
Changing the Installation Path in the Setup Program
Update the Setup program in both application-level and document-level solutions.
For document-level solutions, you must also update the path in the document properties.
To change the installation path in the Setup program
Open the Command Prompt window.
Navigate to the directory that contains the previously created Setup program. For more information about this step, see How to: Publish an Office Solution by Using ClickOnce.
Run the Setup program and include the /url parameter, which takes the new installation path as a string. There will be a message that states that the signature of the executable will be invalidated. This means that the certificate used to sign the solution will no longer be valid, and the publisher will be unknown. End users will be shown an extra prompt that asks whether they want to install the solution.
setup.exe /url="Installation path"For example:
setup.exe /url="https://www.fabrikam.com/newlocation"Note
To view the current value of the URL, run setup.exe /url.
For documents and workbooks, open the document you want to deploy so you can update the _AssemblyLocation property.
Updating Document-Level Solutions with the New Path
You can update the _AssemblyLocation property from inside the Office application. However, if you created a Ribbon with the startFromScratch property set to true, you might not have access to the properties while the customization is running.
To update the path in the document properties
Click the File tab, point to Prepare, and then click Properties.
Click Document Properties, and then click Advanced Properties.
On the Custom tab, in the Properties list, select _AssemblyLocation.
In the Value box, there is a deployment manifest identifier already present. At the beginning of the identifier, type the fully qualified path of the document followed by a bar, in the format path|identifier.
As an example, the path could look like this:
\\servername\foldername\filename|74744e4b-e4d6-41eb-84f7-ad20346fe2d9
For more information about how to format this identifier, see Custom Document Properties Overview.
Click OK, and then save and close the document.
Run the Setup program without the /url parameter to install the solution in the specified location.
See Also
Tasks
How to: Update Deployed Office Solutions
How to: Roll Back a ClickOnce Office Solution to an Earlier Version