Today we'll look at
the software update workflow engine in
System Center Configuration Manager.
Which now a natively supports
Office 365 clients.
We'll show you how to enable it
how it works, and your options.
With System Center Configuration Manager
Office 365 clients, including Office 365 Pro Plus, Visio Pro and Project Pro
can now receive updates using the new servicing capabilities.
Now you can leverage configuration managers built-in workflow engine
to natively distribute software updates.
Its pretty straight forward to enable it
so let me show you how.
First, we're gonna go into the Configuration.XML file
and I'm going to add this new OfficeMgmtCOM
and set it to True.
This will now enable Office clients
to be able to be managed by Configuration Manager.
For those of you who are enabling this feature for existing Office 365 clients
you're gonna want to go ahead and leverage
the Group Policy Object and enable it
by clicking on the Office 365 Client Management
and selecting the Enable button.
Now that your office clients are aware of Configuration Manager
let's walk through what the software update process looks like.
Each time a new build is uploaded to the Office 365 cloud
a new package is also published in the Microsoft Updates Center.
System Center Configuration Manager will download that package
and identify which PCs are applicable to it.
Once it has completed that
it will go ahead and request for those software updates
directly from the Office 365 Cloud.
Now note, this is a key difference on how the Microsoft Update Service works.
Where it actually provides a software package
as part of the initial package.
Once the update request has been received
it will go ahead and download all the necessary files
to update Office to the site server
and then distribute it to all the distribution points across your network.
So now let's go to the Configuration Management Console
and see what this looks like.
Now before Configuration Manager can download the actual updates
we're going to need to make sure that your system is configured
to be able to detect and download the actual software.
And to do so
we're going to have to go into the site server
and specifically configure the software update points
to detect the classification
and products of the new Office 365 client updates.
And what we'll have to do under classification
is select the updates.
And that under products
we're going to want to make sure that the Office 365 client
which is a brand new category
is checked and available for the downloads.
Once you have done that
we're going to go back into the software library
and go under all software updates
to actually search for the actual software packages.
I'm going to type in Office 365 client.
And you'll see we have a number of updates available here.
We have multiple options that the workflow enables us to do.
One, I can right click and select to just download and stage my packages
across my individual distribution points.
Or I can download and directly deploy to a targeted machine.
Let me show you what it looks like to download.
Now when I'm creating a package
I'm going to want to create a brand new deployment package
I'm going to type in the title of this and call it Office 365 client
And I'm going to select a location to where the package should download
on my site server.
I'm going to select a predefined location
and create a new folder
I'm gonna call this
finance team
and make sure I select the folder
and then click on next.
Here I would select the distribution points
that I want to be able to distribute the actual packages to.
I'm going to select next
and then continue to select the defaults
that are available to me here in the workflow.
You could see at one point
I'm going to have the different language
that I would like to download.
Here we have a couple things like Estonia, Finnish, French
I'm going to go ahead and select next
and then complete that actual workflow process.
What you're seeing here
is the ability for System Center Configuration Manager
to send that requests directly to the Office 365 Cloud.
And then download those bits directly onto that site server
And as you saw
the rules are going to go ahead and distribute those files
directly to the individual distribution points.
Once we've downloaded the all of the files
let's see what we can actually do with the deployment packages.
We can actually start deploying the packages out individual targeted users.
Or I can create an automatic rule like I have here for my finance team.
As you can see here
what we're trying to do is target our finance team
for our first release for deferred bits.
By doing so
I'm going to set up a search criteria that's going to
look for the first release for defered channels
automatically download these bits
and distribute those out to those individuals targeted machines.
Now one more thing.
For those of you who have not moved to
the latest version of Configuration Manager
we've also made available scripts
for Configuration Manager 2007 and 2012
on GitHub to find the closest distribution points
for software updates to override the update path settings dynamically.
These are available at the link below.
What I've showed you today is available in the current channel
and first release for deferred channel.
Broad availability for deferred channel will roll out in June later this year.
Keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for more demo benches and updates.
Thanks for watching!
Microsoft Mechanics
www.microsoft.com/mechanics