After (metaphorically) banging my head against a brick wall for some time, I’ve finally got Office 2013 installed (on-demand) as per this guide (which is excellent):
http://www.ronnipedersen.com/2012/11/how-to-deploying-microsoft-office-2013-using-configmgr-2012/
I’d tried using this guide over and over again with no success. My clients CAS log was reporting 0 distribution points, and the Software Center was either saying that the installation failed (with various error codes, one of which was 0x87d00607) or that the software couldn’t be found on any servers. The server side was just reporting that Distribution Manager couldn’t find or create… blah blah blah. I think you get the message. Anyway, at various points of searching I found- in sequence- these two pages:
Which both basically refer to
The irritating thing is, I’d tried this suggestion from msvconsultancy.co.uk and it hadn’t worked because I hadn’t tied everything together. After finally (re-)finding the same info at windows-noob.com I re-configured the Site System Installation account properties, deleted the distribution point from the application, re-distributed it and then it worked very, very quickly- I think Office was installed in about 5 minutes. So a big thanks to Ronni Pedersen and Ben Kellermann for their joint effort at sorting out my Office 2013 deployment issues (I hadn’t followed Ronni’s blog exactly as I’d skipped the “Requirements” bits- I just wanted to get Office installed on a test Hyper-V machine so wasn’t that bothered about providing conditions). Ben Kellerman’s post is particularly helpful as presumably I’d have encountered these errors regardless of which program I was distributing.