Microsoft Office 2010 – Activation, Allow non-admin user to activate manually

If you’re having trouble trying to get Microsoft Office 2010 to activate over a proxy because it times out too quickly and there’s no easy way to get around this, you can grant the user the ability to activate Office 2010 manually which should resolve the issue. By default a user with admin rights will be able to activate office.

The following is displayed when a non-admin user tries to activate Office 2010:

“This action requires Administrator privileges. Please contact a system administrator for future assistance”

To overcome this, you can change a simple registry key:

Start > Run > Notepad

Paste the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform]
"UserOperations"=dword:00000001

File > Save As > Office2010Activation.reg – Save as type: All Files.

This will allow this to be automated via GroupPolicy/ZENworks or something similar.