So today I am downloading the 2007 Office Beta 2 installs (and whoever heard of paying $1.50 for 5 download tries? I sort of understand, but if it were really just covering bandwidth fees, I should think it would be a lot lower). I note that the download listings/product key e-mails do not come with checksums for these large files.

The files are all in the 75 MiB – 250 MiB range. In UNIX-land, people would as part of the normal posting process just provide checksums. But in Windows-land apparently this is not done. Why not?

Checksums are extremely useful for making sure that the bits you expected to transfer over the network are the ones you got. You can see that this would be useful for both file content verification in the sense of “did I lose any bits along the way that would corrupt my install and can I know it before trying to install and have it fail?” But it’s also useful in the sense of making sure that the bits you want me to download are the same ones I want to get, and assuring that no 3rd party attackers did a man-in-the-middle attack, substituting trojan horses and other nasty things into the install instead. Okay, granted, private key encryption technology would be better than a simple checksum, but a checksum would still be better than nothing, which is what I get when I pay $1.50 to download the damned things.

With that in mind, let me introduce you to NullRiver’s winMd5Sum. This is a free and easy to use utility that allows you to create MD5 checksums on files and also to compare pre-generated checksums to the ones you generate on your end to check the download. Go use it. You’ll like it. While you’re at it, tell your download hosts (Microsoft too, please) that you’d like it if they’d start using it or some similar process to help you verify your large file downloads.

For posterity, I’m going to post the MD5 checksums I’ve got so far for my Office 2007 Beta 2 downloads (from Microsoft via the License Technology Group) [This assumes that each binary isn’t especially constructed for each product key – I guess we’ll see]:

• Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 – OFS32-EN.IMG – 14,796,544 bytes – MD5: 4ba65c890b6c86158666b41c3652d2bb
• Microsoft Office Groove 2007 – OG-EN.EXE – 220,111,048 bytes – MD5: ba497c8610ae774b4f3af92755e83bf7 [Works fine]
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 – OON-EN.EXE – 231,814,328 bytes – MD5: 95750f6b8c48c602b39c4b1271913398 [Works fine]
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager – BCM-EN.EXE – 252,769,672 bytes – MD5: 9cb44475cfbbbebb7c84eced9ef6e437 [Works fine]
• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 – OPPLUS-EN.EXE – 461,881,224 bytes – MD5: 7fc65a38b6bd9dce0563afea2c5b9a93 [Works fine]
• Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007 – OPP-EN.EXE – 210,237,736 bytes – MD5: 50c1f917637de95c9aa72114e6385acb [Works fine]
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 – SPD-EN.EXE – 236,994,544 bytes – MD5: 94fe6551b52ef1d38556d76677966073 [Works fine]
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – Enterprise – SPS32-EN.IMG – 308,555,776 bytes – MD5: 0db4750dd73faca499fc5df95c7f63b3
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search – OSS-EN.IMG – 231,387,136 bytes – MD5: c1c2b5ed9c0a31c48fb59afe3fb29919
• Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007 – OVP-EN.EXE – 293,966,312 bytes – MD5: 4259e1f323509e8392143e20416490f5 [Works fine]
• Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services [v3] – SharePoint_setup.exe – 78,849,224 bytes – MD5: 51cd9f824bb5b6bfc90b96f0de956a1b

This is the complete list of the downloads I paid for.

Also, FYI, here is the link for the Beta 2 Technical Refresh download.

Here’s the file info for that download:

• Microsoft Office 2007 Beta Two Technical Refresh – office2007b2tr-kb000000-fullfile-en-us.exe – 518,733,856 bytes – MD5: 9ad077c27fb279516b8636e43c3e0463 [Works fine]

I haven’t verified that all of these files work, but I have verified that the total file size is the same as was originally reported when I initiated the download, which is as close as you can get without MD5 or other checksum tools. I’ll note by striking the item out if for some reason the download is corrupt. Also, when I say [Works fine], I mean that it installed fine with all options installed to run on the drive. I won’t say that the actual programs installed worked fine, as they are in Beta.