Deploy Office 2016 – Office 365
The post will detail how to deploy the Office 365 version of Office 2016. This can be used to deploy it from ConfigMgr, MDT, or basically any other systems management platform.
To begin, you need the Office 2016 deployment tool, available here: https://microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49117. After download, extract it to a directory on your computer (for this article, I will use C:\office2016).
Download Setup Files
First, we need to download the Office package. This download process will download the setup files for Office, Visio, and Project. If you do not need or are not licensed for Visio and Project, simply exclude all mentions of them.
Make a copy of the configuration.xml file that is in contained in your extraction directory (C:\office2016 for me) and rename it download.xml. Open it with your favorite text editor. In the first add line (line 18 in my screenshot), add the “source” property and reference your extraction directory, as well as remove the branch property. Also, add an entry for Project.
Save your download.xml file and exit your text editor. Now, open a command prompt and navigate to your extraction directory. Use this command to download the Office installation files (be sure to change download.xml to your file name if that is not correct):
It will take a few minutes for the files to download. You can watch Task Manager for setup.exe. When it closes, the files are downloaded.
Configure Installation
While the files download, we can modify our configuration.xml file to handle our install. Open it up with your favorite text editor. Modify your products on lines 19 – 27 according to the screenshot of the download.xml file. If you do not need (or are not licensed for) Visio and Project, simply delete their Product entries. You can also set additional properties by uncommenting the lines with Updates, Display Level, and property name. For a full list of properties, see this TechNet article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219426(v=office.16).
Here’s a fairly complete file that will install Office and Visio with no user screens, accepts the EULA, puts the machine in the current branch for updates, and attempts to auto activate the software:
Install Office
Once your configuration file is complete, save and close it. Now, from the command line, execute this command:
Office will be installed in 10-15 minutes.
SCCM Application Deployment
Office 2016 will deploy from SCCM like any other application. The only difficult thing may be finding a detection method for your deployment type. I recommend using the version registry value contained in the uninstallation key. Here’s a screenshot of my detection method:
