Is it possible to enable logging or any kind of debug mode for the Office Deployment Tool?

Question

I'm having a difficult issue with installing Office 2016 using the Office Deployment Tool (ODT). The problem is compounded by the fact that I can't see any way to get information about what ODT is actually doing - it simply gives this vague status message, and no other information beyond error messages (and I've extracted as much relevant info from those as I can).

We're getting things ready

According to this MS blog article from 2010, for earlier versions of Office it was possible to enable "Verbose logging" for their installers:

The first thing to do when troubleshooting Office install failures is to ensure that MSI verbose logging is enabled. In Office 2007/2010 there is a setup.exe log file that gets created by default, but it does not give the amount of detail that is usually required to diagnose an installation failure. With verbose MSI logging enabled we will get a verbose log file for each component that Office 2007/2010 installs. We will have a verbose log for the install of the Word component, one for Excel, and so on.

To enable verbose logging you will want to set the following registry keys.

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer] 
 "Debug"=dword:00000007 
 "Logging"="voicewarmup"

However, this is specific to the old installation procedure which appears to have been per application ("a verbose log for the install of the Word component, one for Excel, and so on"), whereas my understanding is that ODT (introduced with Office 2013) installs them all as one.

Is there anything like this that allows verbose logging, or any other form of debugging, for installs using the Office Deployment Tool with Office 2016?

Answer 1

It turns out logging settings for ODT is controlled by the Configuration.xml config file, which toggles between Off and Standard logging.

From the reference for the config xml, the default is Standard logging, saved to %TEMP%.

I had trouble finding the relevant logs there, so I got easier-to-use results by creating a log folder in the folder I was using for ODT and adding the following to my config file, below the <Configuration> but outside the <Add>:

  <Logging Level="Standard" Path="C:\odt\log" />

The log files themselves have a filename with no reference to ODT (hence my problems finding them in %TEMP%), of format PCNAME-DATESTAMP-TIMESTAMP for example MYPC-20151120-1330.

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Here's an example of a complete configuration that worked for me, including the logging config, so you can see more easily where it goes:

<Configuration>

  <Add OfficeClientEdition="32" Branch="Current" Version="16.0.4229.1029" SourcePath="C:\odt">
    <Product ID="O365BusinessRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
    </Product>
  </Add>

  <Logging Level="Standard" Path="C:\odt\log" />

</Configuration>

Answer 2

Further to the answer already given for this, it is worth noting that there is now a handy config-file creator online at http://config.office.com that gives you a link to grab the ODT if you don't have it already and then walks you through setting up a config file with a series of Wizard-style questions about what you want to deploy, what language you want to use, etc, etc.