The next step was to check each server within the farm to verify which version of MOSS 2007 had been installed.
The easiest way to do this is to look within the registry – HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\
The registry key OfficeServerPremium indicates the version of MOSS 2007 installed, a 0 indicates Standard Edition and a 1 indicates Enterprise Edition.
I managed to find a server within the farm where this key was a 1; this was the culprit of the problem. The server had been mistakenly built with an Enterprise Edition key L
The next step I would recommend would be to tear down the farm and rebuild from scratch just to make sure that each and every server is Standard Edition and there are no references to the Enterprise Edition anywhere, simply removing the server(s) that have the Enterprise Edition installed doesn’t remove the links to Excel and BDC from the SSP admin site.
Now in this case we were working with a development farm that is to be rebuilt in the short term anyway so we had the ability to have a play around, we removed the Enterprise server from the farm, rebuilt as Standard and then re-added to the farm.
What I did find is that the following features are responsible for adding the BDC and Excel links to the SSP admin site(s)
· BDCAdminUILinks
· ExcelServer
By simply deactivating these features the links are removed from the SSP admin site(s). NOTE – THIS SHOULD NOT BE DONE IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
The following commands can be used to achieve this
· stsadm -o deactivatefeature -filename bdcadminuilinks\feature.xml
· stsadm -o deactivatefeature -filename excelserver\feature.xml
In a production environment I would recommend a rebuild of the farm rather than manually removing the links by deactivating the features.