As seen in the previous post, I came across a way to remotely uninstall applications across my domain computers, with a single command, remotely and silently. This would have been incredibly useful when i was updating my users to Microsoft Office 2007. Previously, I used a remote uninstall tool, one at a time, to uninstall the various versions of office that were installed here at Big Blue. It took alot of time, because of the numerous different versions installed. example:
- Microsoft Office 2007 Standard
- Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
- Microsoft Office 2003 Basic
- Microsoft Office 2003 Outlook
- Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise
- Microsoft Office 2007 Project Professional
- Microsoft Office 2007 Visio Professional
- Microsoft Office 2000 Professional
- Microsoft Office 2003 Professional
- Microsoft Office 2000
- Microsoft Office 2003 Visio Standard
- Microsoft Office 2007 Basic
- Microsoft Office 2007 Visual Web Developer
- Microsoft Office 2003 Standard
- Microsoft Office 2007 Visio Viewer
- Microsoft Office 2007 SharePoint Designer
- Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint
- Microsoft Office 2003 Word Viewer
- Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint Viewer
- Microsoft Office 2007 SharePoint Server
- Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components
Yea, i didn’t feel like building a script to uninstall all that crap, so NOW, i know i can uninstall all that with a single command, provided i have a list of all the computers i want to uninstall from, which can be had by using “net view”, copying and pasting into a text file.
so yea, here it is, the one command that could have saved me hours of work:
for /f %n in (all-domain-pcs.txt) do wmic /NODE:%n product where "name like '%Microsoft Office%'" call uninstall
Like the Java remote uninstall, it is not very fast, but it is effective, and beats uninstalling each, one at a time.
I highly recommend giving it a test run using the following to see what the wildcard is going to catch:
for /f %n in (all-domain-pcs.txt) do wmic /NODE:%n product where "name like '%Microsoft Office%'" get name
Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk. I will not be held responsible if you manage to uninstall everything from your domain computers.
Wow, great article, cannot believe I have missed this simple WMI command line tool from Microsoft.
Saved me loads of time.
I tried tunning the script but getting error like: The system cannot find the file all-domain-pcs.txt. Kindly suggest
you need a listing of computers in a text file in the same directory you are running from. when you open a command line, it starts in c:usersusername, so you would need to create a txt file from from notepad or whatever else you please, and have it contain a list of computers you want to run the uninstaller against, example:
(yes the quotes are required if there is a dash in the system name)
then save that as c:usersusernameall-domain-pcs.txt
also note, for some reason, my blog platform automatically converted the first single quote, i’ll try to repost:
for /f %n in (all-domain-pcs.txt) do wmic /NODE:%n product where "name like '%Office 200%'" call uninstall
Great stuff! Thanks!
Great, thanks for this excellent tip!!
When I run the command the command it says ” for – alias not found”
Jason, i just ran into this the other day, and i’m pretty sure you have to remove the leading backslashes from the file with the list of computers.
can you give me details on how to remotely uninstall just visio standard 2010 and projects standard 2010 from a number odf machines in a domain