Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)

Inspired by Trond Eric Haavarstein’s evergreen PowerShell setup scripts, I created a download and install script for Office 365 Deployment Tool (ODT).

Microsoft Office 365 is the new standard in the EUC space right now. To honor this, we need a fast and reliable way to install it with our favorite deployment tools like MDT or PDQ,  for example when you rebuild your master images.

There are a few different ways to deploy Office 365, but they are all similar:

  • You need the Office 365 Click-to-run setup.exe (Office Deployment Tool (ODT))
  • You need a XML configuration file
  • You decide to deploy from a pre-build offline cache or the files are downloaded from Microsoft each and every time

And then you go: setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

Pretty straight forward you think, but non the less I had problems with this approach. And this is due to the fact, that the Office Deployment Tool itself gets updated pretty often. And this breaks your unattended deployments sooner or later, as the setup.exe stops working. Continue reading “Download and install latest Office 365 via Office Deployment Tool (ODT)”

Office 365 ProPlus now officially supported on Windows Server 2019 + release of FSLogix

Today Microsoft made a huge announcement for the EUC community: Office 365 ProPlus now officially supported on Windows Server 2019 and FSLogix is now available for everyone who is entitled!

You can find the official announcement from Microsoft here: Improving the Office app experience in virtual environments

Additionally Microsoft finally releases a slightly rebranded version of the FSLogix Full suite which is now called Microsoft FSLogix and doesn’t need a license key anymore. Also the versioning has been changed, to reflect the style of several other Microsoft of Citrix products with now 4 digits,the first 2 digits refer to the year, and the last 2 digits refer to the month. The version being now is called 1907. Check out if you’re eligible. You must be licensed for one of the following Microsoft products: Continue reading “Office 365 ProPlus now officially supported on Windows Server 2019 + release of FSLogix”

Group Policy: Show only specified Control Panel items for Outlook 2016 via Office 365

Quick Tip Blog article: HowTo whitelist the Outlook 2016/Office 365 control panel item correctly.

I just stumbled over something at a customers environment. We had a Outlook 2016 / Office 365 problem in a XenApp session. We tried to access the Outlook control panel item, but it was missing. This was no surprise, as we have the GPO…

Show only specified Control Panel items

…enabled in every environment. This acts as a whitelisting for the control panel items, so the user only has access to those items, that matter to him. Continue reading “Group Policy: Show only specified Control Panel items for Outlook 2016 via Office 365”

Silent uninstall Office 365

I had to bulk repair a few Office 365 Fat Client Installations. With the Office 365 Click-to-Run deployment EXE and two XML files this is a quick task.

First download the Office 2016 Deployment Tool:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49117

Continue reading “Silent uninstall Office 365”