This blog was submitted by Jeremy Chapman, director on the Office team

Many organizations use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to deploy Windows with Office to new computers or when re-imaging computers. You can use the tools to deploy just applications, or as part of an operating system + application deployment.

If you’ve been deploying Office or using MDT for a few years, you may know that the integration for Office deployment began in 2007 when MDT was called Business Desktop Deployment 2007 and Office 2007 suites introduced the Office Customization Tool. These capabilities have remained largely unchanged for the MSI package versions of Office over the years – currently Office Professional Plus 2016 and Office Standard 2016.

Fast forward to 2016 and while the tools have been consistent for around nine years, what if you were the IT administrator tasked with building out an imaging solution for Windows 10 and Office 2016 today using MDT? Where is the process documented for installing Office 2016? It turns out the process is documented on TechNet… but labeled as the approach for Office 2010. In reality, the same approach works in Office 2013 and Office 2016 MSI packages.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed MDT, installed the Windows 10 Automated Deployment Kit, and downloaded Office installation files from the Volume Licensing Service Center, here’s what you do to add Office 2016 into your MDT deployment share.

1.  Under MDT Deployment Share, click Applications and then click New Application in the Action pane. The New Application Wizard opens to the Application Type page.

2.  On the Application Type page, make sure that Application with source files is selected, and then click Next.

3.   On the Details page:

       a.     Under Publisher, type the name of the application publisher (optional).

       b.     Under Application Name, type a descriptive name for the application (required).

       c.     Under Version, type the application version (optional).

       d.     Under Language, type the application language (optional).

       e.     Click Next.

4.   On the Source page:

       a.     Click Browse. In the Browse for Folder dialog box, locate and select the folder that contains the setup files for the particular application, and then click OK.

       Note: If you want to move the setup files instead of copying them, select the check box that is next to Move the files to the deployment share instead of copying them.

       b.    Click Next.

5.    On the Destination page, accept or change the default destination folder (the deployment share folder that will contain the application source files) that was assigned by the wizard, and then click Next.

6.    On the Command Details page:

       a. Under Command line, type the command that you want to be run at the start of the application installation. This is typically “setup.exe”, you can access the Office Customization Tool via the Application Properties > Office Products tab later.

       b. Click Next

7.    On the Summary page, click Next.

8.    The Progress page indicates that the share is being created. On the Confirmation page, click Finish. The New Application Wizard finishes, and the application name that you typed in the Application Name page appears in the Deployment Workbench details pane.

Now you can access the properties of the Office 2016 install in the Applications menu of your deployment share.

Here in the Office Products tab, you can select the Office product to install and configure Display Level, automatically accept the EULA and suppress reboots.

The majority of your granular Office customization will be done via the Office Customization Tool (OCT), which outputs an update (.MSP) file that is automatically consumed as part of the Office installation. Plus you can use MDT to deploy additional Office applications – like the legacy versions of InfoPath or SharePoint Designer – or use it to install custom Office add-ins. Once you’ve finished the above steps and anything you want to do with the OCT, you can start building Windows or custom application-only deployment task sequences with MDT. 

Starting April, 2016, MSI-based non-security updates will be released on the first Tuesday of each month and MSI-based security updates will be released (as usual) on the second Tuesday of each month.

For more details, please see the following blog post:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/office_sustained_engineering/2016/03/28/upcoming-change-to-the-release-schedule-for-non-security-updates/

After you install the April 5, 2016, update for Outlook 2013 (KB3114941), you may experience random crashes of Microsoft Lync 2013 (Skype for Business) or Microsoft Outlook 2013, or both. This issue is outlined in detail here.

The workaround is to roll your 2013 ProPlus users back to the March build – here are the steps to do so:

Referencing this article, we can use the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Clientx64\OfficeC2RClient.exe command to roll a user back to the March build. If your organization is using the Microsoft CDN to get your Office click to run updates, simply run this command on your affected machine(s):

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Clientx64\OfficeC2RClient.exe /update user updatetoversion=15.0.4805.1003   *note – in the article linked at the beginning of this paragraph, there are other switches we can also add such as display level and update prompts for the users that we can also use depending on the experience you want to deliver for this workaround.

If you are managing your own updates, you have to take one extra step by first downloading the 15.0.4805.1003 build first if you no longer have it. This is because if we do not use the Office CDN as our updates location, but rather an internal file share, when running the command to roll back to the March build, Office will look to that internal updates location for 15.0.4805.1003. If it is not present, we will see this error:

If you are not sure if your updates are coming from an internal share or the Microsoft CDN, look to this registry key to tell us:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun\configuration

In this key, look for UpdateURL and the value will either be HTTP://officecdn.microsoft.com/…. indicating you are using Microsoft’s CDN or you will see \\servername\share\… Indicating you are managing your own updates. If you don’t have an UpdateURL value at all, you are also using the Microsoft CDN.

Once you verify that your organization is managing its own updates, we can use the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) to download 15.0.4805.1003 and then add it your internal update share.

Here is a blog outlining how to use the Office Deployment Tool (ODT)

One change we will have to make when using the Office deployment tool is we will have to specify the version we want to download because the default is to download the newest version and we want 15.0.4805.1003. Here is what your configuration.xml file will look like with the added Version value.

<Configuration>
<Add SourcePath=”\\server\share\…” Version=”15.0.4805.1003″ OfficeClientEdition=”32″ >
<Product ID=”O365ProPlusRetail”>
<Language ID=”en-us” />
</Product>
</Add>
</Configuration>

Next, follow the steps outlined in the Using the Office Deployment tool for click to run blog to download (setup.exe /download configuration.xml) 15.0.4805.1003 and once the download is complete, add the source files to your internal updates location. Now we can run the command to roll back to that build:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\Clientx64\OfficeC2RClient.exe /update user updatetoversion=15.0.4805.1003

Links:

April 5, 2016, update for Outlook 2013 (KB3114941) https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3114941

Lync 2013 (Skype for Business) or Outlook 2013 Crash https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3158521

The new Update Now feature for Office 2013 Click-to-Run for Office365 https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/odsupport/2014/03/03/the-new-update-now-feature-for-office-2013-click-to-run-for-office365-and-its-associated-command-line-and-switches/

Using the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/odsupport/2014/07/11/using-the-office-deployment-tool-for-click-to-run/

Issue:

If your organization has not taken steps to prevent the upgrade, users will start seeing the following business bar in their Office applications:

Resolution:

If you would like to stop receiving this business bar and block upgrades, please take the following steps:

1. Follow these steps to prevent the upgrade
2. On the systems that already seeing the above business bar, edit the following registry key:
   1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun\Updates
      UpgradePackageVersion REG_SZ   Value = 0.0.0.0

 

More Information:

When you are ready to enable upgrades simply undo the changes you made per the steps to prevent the upgrade.

 

Issue: After the recent release of the Office Deployment Tool version 16.0.7118.5775 users are seeing issues with installs/updates due to not having the V32.cab data file come down with the source files download.

Errors seen are 30029.1011 and a few other issues all stemming from the missing v32.cab file.

NOTE: Microsoft is aware of this issue and working on releasing an updated version of the Office Deployment Tool as soon as possible.

Workaround: The current workaround is to copy, duplicate, and rename the copied v32_16.0.xxxx.xxx.cab to v32.cab (See Below)

Step 1: Source file location after the initial download. As stated above you’re missing the v32.cab file.

Step 2: Copy, and then paste the copied version seen below.

Step 3: Then rename the resulting copied V32_versoned.cab to v32.cab to allow Install/Updates to continue as expected.

Office 365 updates are designed to be very network bandwidth friendly. There is Binary Delta Compression that occurs so long as the machines are staying current and Office has built in throttles to prevent every machine from trying to update at the same time. However, IT admins will sometimes still need to monitor the size of the monthly updates very closely. Here is how to determine how large the update for Office ProPlus will be:

Step 1.
Download Process Monitor from the Windows Sysinternals collection here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Step 2.
When you launch Process Monitor the filter menu may auto load but if not, click on Filter > filter to open the filter menu. In here Exclude the following Event Classes:

• Registry
• File System
• Process

And only include the “OfficeClicktoRun.exe” Process Name. Your filter should look something like this:

Step 3.
Start Process Monitor and launch the manual update process by clicking “Update Now” in the File > Account menu of any Office Click-to-Run app. We will see the updates downloading and data filling in the Procmon log.

Step 4.
Once the update finishes, stop the Procmon trace and then check for the network traffic summary by going to Tools > Network Summary.

In my example I was on the July version of Deferred Channel – 16.0.6741.2056 and then updated to the August version – 16.0.6741.2063. As we can see, this update is 167,829,264 bytes, or roughly 167 MB of data.

**UPDATE**

Our investigation determined that a certificate was recently deployed to replace an expiring certificate; however, we failed to initiate a process to whitelist the new certificate. We’ve whitelisted the certificate to restore service but users may still have a token within their client which is associated with the previous certificate. To resolve the issue, users can sign out and sign back in to one of their Office desktop applications. Alternatively, the token will expire after eight hours and a new one will be issued. If users wait for a new token, the latest that the token will expire, and that service will be restored, is 1:15 AM UTC on March 15, 2017.

We received multiple reports of an immerging issue:
“Sorry, there was a problem while trying to connect to your account with error code 0x15”

This appears to be affecting systems using Shared Computer Activation and Office 365 ProPlus with legacy authentication. Our Product Group team is currently conducting an investigation and identifying solutions for this issue. Office 2013 ProPlus is configured to use legacy authentication (IDCRL) by default and many of the customers reporting this issue are on this version. Please note the end of support for Office 365 ProPlus 2013 was on February 28, 2017. Therefore, we strongly recommend to upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus 2016.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3199744/support-for-the-2013-versions-of-office-365-proplus-ends-february-28,-2017

Enabling ADAL on Office 365 ProPlus systems has worked as a possible workaround while the product team determines the cause of this. For 2016 versions of ProPlus builds, ADAL is enabled by default.

The following documentation provides information about how to enable ADAL:

– How to enable the registry key for ADAL
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Enable-Modern-Authentication-for-Office-2013-on-Windows-devices-7dc1c01a-090f-4971-9677-f1b192d6c910?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
For Office 2016:  HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity\EnableADAL

– Verify that the ADAL .dlls files are the minimum required builds for this to work properly:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Using-Office-365-modern-authentication-with-Office-clients-776c0036-66fd-41cb-8928-5495c0f9168a?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1

Starting on Version 1708 the ‘Update Now’ from the Office 365 Application backstage is no longer visible if the Office installation is also configured to receive updates through SCCM.

This change was implemented so that Users cannot bypass administrative configuration settings around updating Office.

Prior to Version 1708:

At Version 1708 and greater you will see a message that Updates are managed by your admin:

The ‘Update Now’ option is also hidden:

If a user requires individually updating the Office Client outside of SCCM, they can still do this through command line with elevated privileges.

To manually trigger an Office update, run “OfficeC2RClient.exe /update user” from the cmd prompt path ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun>”

To specify a specific version run “OfficeC2RClient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.xxxx.xxxx”

For more information around configuring updates, please see Configure Update Settings for Office 365 ProPlus.

There are times during troubleshooting an Office issue when the traditional log settings are not gathering enough information. This could be for Sign-In issues, installation and patching issue, even App issues.

To gather more verbose logging details, set the following registry key.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Logging]
"EnableLogging"=dword:00000001

Reproduce the issue and gather the logs for review. The logs will be stored under %temp%. Note the time stamp you did the repro so you gather the correct logs.

Turn off the Office ULS verbose logging setting after you gather the logs, otherwise this will continue to gather verbose data and take up more dive space.

Reg keys to automate logging enabled/disabled: Enable-Local-Logging2016 Disable-Local-Logging2016

Issue: When customers install Office Professional Plus 2013 MSI or Lync 2013 MSI standalone and use the Office Customization Tool (OCT) to change the default Start Menu Shortcut path, after installing the April 2015 update for Office which transforms Lync 2013 to Skype for Business 2013, the shortcut for Skype for Business will remain as “Lync 2013” which can be confusing for end users.

We can work around this by using a PowerShell script like the following sample to change the Lync shortcut icons to Skype for Business icons. *Note – this script is an example script and should be tested before being used in production.

============================================
$shortcutLocation = "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Office 2013\"
$oldShortcut = "Lync 2013.lnk"
$newShortcut = "Skype for Business 2015.lnk"
$iconComment = "Connect with people everywhere through voice and video calls, Skype Meetings, and IM."

# Rename shortcut:
Rename-Item $shortcutLocation$oldShortcut $newShortcut

# Change the new shortcut settings
$shell = New-Object -COM WScript.Shell
$shortcut = $shell.CreateShortcut($shortcutLocation+$newShortcut)
$shortcut.Description = $iconcomment
$shortcut.Save()

#Get the Icon Name and Folder
$iconlocation = $shortcut.IconLocation
$tempInd = $iconlocation.indexof("Icon")

$iconName = $iconlocation.substring($tempInd,$iconlocation.indexof(".exe")-$tempInd )
$iconFolder = $iconlocation.substring(0,$tempInd)

#Change the icon:
Rename-Item $iconFolder$iconName".exe" $iconFolder$iconName"_old.exe"
Copy-Item $iconFolder"lyncicon.exe" $iconFolder$iconName".exe" -force

=====================================