(mechanical sounds)
- Coming up, we take a look at what you need to know
to prepare for Office deployment
using System Center Configuration Manager.
Now over this episode and the next,
I'm gonna walk you through what's different,
how to plan for your Office deployment,
what to do and what not to do,
and how to make sure any Office add-ins
or macros will be compatible,
and the prerequisites you'll wanna set up
prior to creating your Office packages.
Office is available as a part of Office 365,
or as part of volume licensing with Office 2019.
Now the Office 365 versions are assigned to users
and activation is subscription-based,
whereas Office 2019 versions are activated machine-based
and use key management service as infrastructure
via your own servers.
Of course you can continue to use
multiple activation keys there as well.
Now for both Office 365 and Office 2019 versions,
both use the same application packaging, Click-to-Run,
and installation approach, and both can be managed
by a group policy.
Now a common misperception is
that all Click-to-Run packages use subscription activation.
Click-to-Run versions for Office 2019 apps
are offered as well, so not all Click-to-Run
equals subscription activation.
Now with the introduction of Office 365 versions of Office,
you no longer have to wait for
what was typically three years for new capabilities.
Though all Office versions like 2019
and 2016 have had static feature sets
over their support life cycle,
Office 365 apps receive continual innovation
through monthly or semi-annual channel updates.
Now one major difference between Office 365
and Office 2019 releases is that Office 365 versions
by default receive monthly feature updates,
in addition to security and reliability fixes.
In fact, there are four different update channels
to be aware of.
The monthly channel provides users with the newest features
of Office as soon as they're available.
The semi-annual channel delivers new features in Office
only a few times a year.
Now there's also a semi-annual channel (targeted)
for pilot users and compatibility testers
to test out new semi-annual channel releases in advance.
And monthly channel (targeted),
now this is the closest thing to the insider's release,
and provides advanced releases of monthly channel builds
also for testing.
Now both Office 2019 releases
and semi-annual channel releases will receive security
and reliability fixes between new releases,
but for Office 2019 versions,
the feature set is gonna be static
for the duration of the product life cycle.
Now to prepare for Office deployment,
there are three phases that we're gonna cover
over the course of our two episodes
on preparing for Office deployment and management:
Discover, Plan, and Configure.
Now in this episode, we're gonna look at
what you need to know to discover your Office's state,
including update models, tooling, network optimizations,
and everything up until you start to plan for compatibility.
Now typically, Office usage falls
into two different categories.
General Purpose is for the average use case
with the minimal customizations, COM add-ins,
or VBA macros that are running on those machines.
Now these are typically the majority of PCs
and it's recommended that these PCs
use the monthly channel updates.
Now the other type is Business Essential.
Now these tend to have more COM add-ins installed in,
are often for Excel power users,
where you might have more peace of mind testing
and validating feature updates in advance.
Now these PCs can use the semi-annual channel updates
to keep feature updates consistent
for discovered customizations.
To take an inventory of COM add-ins,
SCCM 1902 and newer is actually able to enumerate
installed Office add-ins.
Another option that you can use
is the Readiness Toolkit for Office
to inventory your COM add-ins.
Now here's where you'll create collections
for general purpose and business essential PCs
in SCCM like I described earlier.
Once your Discover steps are complete,
you can move on to the Plan phase.
Now here's where we're gonna look at things like
networking considerations, language configs, policies,
preferences, app architectures,
and compatibility assessment.
Let's start with network.
So to save internet and VPN traffic while ensuring
that your Office installs are kept up to date,
you can also choose the direct update distribution
of the Office 365 content delivery network or CDN.
And in these cases if you enable delivery optimization
in Windows 10, it allows for peer to peer delivery
to minimize internet bandwidth usage
so not every client is individually
pulling down update payloads.
Now similarly, if you use SCCM infrastructure,
you can use peer cache to reduce local or VPN traffic
to remote distribution points,
and you can enable it very easily in client Settings,
and with peer cache, you manually define a well-connected
client PC on a local network or subnet
to cache deployment source, then Office update files
will be pulled from that device.
Moving on to languages, if you manage
multiple Office languages, you can configure Office installs
to have the full or partial languages or proofing language
support that you need in the payload.
Now one common mistake here in multilingual environments
is building a single package for all users with most
or all of the languages for your organization.
Now if too many languages are added,
the Office package size can quickly become several gigabytes
as we can see here on the screen.
So let's move on to policies and preferences.
Office 365 ProPlus and volume licensing versions
of Office 2019 support Active Directory
Group Policy management,
and they use the Office 2016 templates.
Now additionally install-time policy preferences
can be configured with the same versions of Office
using the new Office Customization Tool
from config.office.com, or as part of
the Office 365 installer process in SCCM.
Now remember, as with the previous Office Customization Tool
for MSI installers, these are preferences,
and not enforced policies.
So what you configure may be changed by the user.
Now a brand new policy-enforcement option
for Office 365 ProPlus is the Office cloud policy service
which, when configured, is simply triggered
by user sign in to their Office 365 accounts.
Now these policies work regardless of
how Office 365 was installed on their machines,
and whether or not that user's PC is domain-joined
or otherwise managed.
Now you just need to add users
to the Azure AD security group
and define the group against the policies
that you configure.
Now when the targeted PC connects to the Office 365 account
via the internet, policies are then updated
and applied to those machines.
Now note here that these policies are currently limited
to HKEY_CURRENT_USER policies and are not applied
to other user profiles on a PC,
unless those users are also part
of the Office 365 groups that you target.
Now let's move on to some Visio and Project considerations.
So if some of you user have Visio
or Project already installed,
there are a few things to be aware of.
First, volume licensing versions of Visio and Project
can coexist on the same computer
with subscription activation Office 365 ProPlus.
Second, Visio 2019 and Project 2019,
like their Visio Online and Project Online
client counterparts, are only packaged using Click-to-Run.
So if they coexist with other Click-to-Run versions
of Office, they need to be at an equivalent version level.
Third, if you're using Click-to-Run packaged versions
of Visio or Project, they need to be
on the same update channel as each other
and as other Click-to-Run Office install on the same PC.
Now finally, the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures,
or bitness, of Visio and Project must match
that of other Office suite installs on the same computer,
or the install will fail as you'll see here.
Now related to the installation architecture,
if your organization has currently standardized
on 32-bit Office, and your users have
some COM add-ins installed,
if you wanna go to Office 64-bit,
you're gonna need to replace native 32-bit COM add-ins
with native 64-bit compiled COM add-ins.
Now unlike with Windows on Windows, or WOW 64,
64-bit Office does not provide an emulation solution
to run 32-bit COM add-ins in 64-bit Office installs.
As you can see here in this case,
after the architecture migration,
the native 32-bit add-in did not load.
So now you know how to discover your Office estate
and we've covered the tools, servicing channels,
and things to help you with compatibility,
how you can set policies and preferences
as well as options for preparing
and optimizing your network bandwidth.
Next, as part of this prep stage,
we're gonna cover inventory and readiness,
add-in macro compatibility, and much more.
As well as configuration prerequisites
that you'll need to be aware of as part of
your Office deployment and management.
Thanks for watching and we'll see you there.
(techno music)