Microsoft Office 2010 and 2013 volume license editions use the Volume License 2.0 mechanism to manage activation. Office 2010 and 2013 will activate against our campus Key Management Service (KMS), without user intervention, in a manner similar to Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Occasionally, the activation process doesn’t work. Problems are usually related to network communication with the KMS. Below are some steps to identify and resolve problems that might occur during activation.
Gather Information.
Gathering data is essential to fixing problems. If you ask me (or other IT staff) for help with Office 2010 activation, the first thing I will ask from you is the output of the commands in the steps below.
There are a few steps that will make it easy to collect all the output of your troubleshooting steps.
- Open an elevated Command Prompt (Run As Administrator)
- Change the Properties of the command prompt window to increase the Screen Buffer
height to, say, 3000 lines. This will prevent you losing earlier steps as the lines scroll off the screen. - Run cscript /h:cscript, which changes the default script host to cscript, so that output will go to the command prompt instead of a pop-up dialog box.
When you are ready to copy the text from the command prompt, right-click the title bar of the window, select Edit > Select All, and then Control-C to Copy the text to the clipboard. Then you can paste the text to any place you want; a webmail message, a footprint entry, or a text file in notepad.