(electronic whirring)
- Coming up, we'll cover the rest
of the preparation steps
for Office deployment and management,
inventory and readiness,
add-in and macro compatibility, and more,
as well as the configuration prerequisites
that you need to be aware of
as part of your Office deployment and management.
So with the top considerations behind us,
we're gonna start by finding
and assessing compatibility of COM add-ins
and VBA macros with newer versions of Office.
Now the good news here is that more
than 99% of your existing add-ins and macros
will continue to work if you're coming
from Office 2010 or newer
and when you install a matching architecture of Office.
As you can see here where 100% of my add-ins
on this machine are supported.
Now despite the high level of compatibility
of Office COM add-ins and macros,
there are new capabilities in SCCM to inventory
and assess compatibility.
Additionally, the Readiness Toolkit for Office,
as you can see that I'm installing here,
can also be used standalone or together with SCCM
to provide additional insights
for VBA macro compatibility.
Now with Configuration Manager version 1902,
we added built-in support to inventory
and assess Office COM add-ins
against known compatibility information.
And this extends SCCM's native
hardware inventory capabilities,
so here to configure that,
we just have to go
into our Office 365 ProPlus Client Settings.
Then we go into hardware inventory and enable that.
Now once we've done that,
we can actually go in and set the classes.
So to do that, I'm gonna click on hardware inventory,
and I'm going to go into Set Classes.
And now here, we've just got to locate
the Office add-ins settings.
So in my case, so you can see,
it's already configured, so I'm good to go.
I'm already collecting information
on add-in compatibility.
Also in 1902 and newer,
Configuration Manager will download a copy
of known compatibility information from Microsoft
to perform a local query against compatibility information
against your inventoried Office COM add-ins.
Now this approach again does not necessitate
that Office Client or add-in information is sent up
to Microsoft cloud services
in order to assess compatibility,
and you can access this information
as part of the Office Client Management dashboard.
And that's all part of Configuration Manager,
and you can drill into the lists of add-ins
that are found in software inventory
that we saw earlier,
and you'll also use this information
to prioritize testing of the most commonly used add-ins,
especially in cases
where there isn't known compatibility information,
such as in cases where you've maybe
developed in house COM add-ins.
Now for VBA macros,
SCCM's expanded inventory capability
does not discover VBA macros themselves,
but you can discover which computers
have recently run macros.
Now with that, you can actually create a device collection,
and then once you've created that collection,
you can use the integration with the
Readiness Toolkit for Office
to discover and assess compatibility
of macros on those computers that have run macros.
Now this is often just a small subset
of your managed PCs.
Now when you run the Readiness Toolkit for Office
using SCCM, data will be logged into SCCM databases,
and from there you can discover VBA macros
with potential issues,
along with corresponding RTO data on those issues.
Now while I've explained what's inside SCCM
for COM add-in compatibility
and how you can use the Readiness Toolkit for Office
in the context of SCCM,
you can also use the Readiness Toolkit for Office
standalone to check a handful of PCs
to validate its findings before you distribute it out
to a large collection of computers.
So now let's move on to look at prerequisites
for configuring our deployment.
If you're not already using an Office 365 ProPlus,
you'll first want to begin by opening up
the right ports protocols and URLs for Click-to-Run
and related services to function properly.
Now all of this is very well documented
at aka.ms/officeendpoints.
Now if you're using Office 365 Suite,
Visio Online, or Project Online,
you'll also want to make sure that your targeted users
are in Azure active directory
and that you've licensed them to be able
to activate Office in Visio and Project
using their sign in information.
Now you'll want to get the full capability of Office 365,
so it's a good idea that you also have OneDrive and Teams,
SharePoint, Exchange,
and all the other licenses configured as well.
If you're moving from 32-bit to 64-bit Office,
there's also a new option to migrate architecture
called MigrateArch.
Now this allows you to target PCs
with existing 32-bit installations,
and any setting will be carried over
automatically to 64-bit,
such as the apps themselves,
the exclusions that you've set up,
or any other install time settings.
Now you'll need to layer in
any additional 64-bit COM add-ins as required as part
of an app installation sequence.
And finally, and as you can see here
with our deployment task sequence,
if you're deploying Office as a part
of an operating system deployment using custom imaging,
we recommend that you don't pre-install Office
within that custom image,
but instead layer in required apps
as part of the installation task sequence,
as well as add-ins.
In fact, the next step in our series,
we're gonna go in depth on all the deployment tools
and considerations as part of your upgrade.
So now we've covered your preparations steps,
and keep watching for parts four and five
in our series to learn everything you need to know
about deploying Click-to-Run Office apps at scale
and how to manage Office post-deployment.
Thanks for watching,
and we'll see you soon.
(gentle electronic music)