This is the video of how to download, install and activate MS Office 2016 on MAC OS X. Just have a look on it and try this experiment on your MAC and if you.

It is now over two months since Microsoft has made the Office for Mac 2016 Volume License installer available for customers in the VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) portal. I have previously documented a couple major issues with the installer that impact those who deploy Office 2016 using automated means (meaning anything that doesn’t involve a user manually running the GUI installer).

In this post I’ll summarize two of the major issues and talk a bit about a conference session that was presented just this past week at MacSysAdmin 2015 by Duncan McCracken.

After a little whirring and blinking, the installer ran and Office 2016 for Mac was on my Mac. Clicking Done resulted in the installer launching Word, with a nice blue intro screen. Microsoft Office 2016 - Unmistakably Office, designed for Mac. The new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote provide the best of both worlds for Mac users - the familiar Office experience paired with the best of Mac. If you already use Office on a PC or iPad, you will find yourself right at home in Office 2016 for Mac.

Running at the loginwindow: fixed, sort of

• . One-time purchase for 1 device. Classic 2016 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook. Install on 1 Mac. Licensed for home and commercial use Compatible with Mac OS X 10.10. All languages included. What you get shopping through TheUnitySoft Full Version Lifetime License for 1 PC No subscriptions – No monthly/annual fees Instant Delivery & Download – access your.
• The desktop apps will attempt Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 Installer to validate your software licenses every 30 days. Annual members can use the apps for up to 99 days in offline Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 Installer mode. Month-to-month members can use the software for up to 30 days in offline mode.

The Office for Mac team has made some progress with one of the major issues with this installer, which was its inability to run the license activation process while at the loginwindow. The latest release in the VL portal at this time of writing is 15.13.4, and it fixes the issue where the license activation (run by Microsoft Setup Assistant) assumed it could connect to a GUI session, which at the loginwindow it cannot.

Unfortunately, they have not yet met what I’d consider the minimum requirement for a deployable installer: that it should be possible to deploy it with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). While ARD has a (deserved) reputation of being unreliable and is not suitable for ongoing management of Macs at a larger-than-small scale, it’s still an easy-to-set-up tool that you can point a software vendor to as a way to test how well their installers stand up to a typical mass deployment scenario.

The reason the Office VL installer fails at the loginwindow with ARD was already explained in the afore-linked post: ARD seems to set a USER environment value of nobody, and when their licensing tool runs it is run using sudo -u $USER, which seems to fail when the command is run as nobody. I don’t see any reason why sudo -u $USER should be used at all in this case.

Confusing security prompt for the auto-update daemon: still there

The other major issue with the installer is that when it detects COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL, it skips the process of registering the Microsoft AU Daemon application (using an undocumented -trusted option) using lsregister, because this should be done as the user launching the app. The end result is that installing this package without other additional steps will result in a confusing “you are running this for the first time” prompt shown to users, triggered by the auto-update daemon, which is triggered automatically on the first launch of any Office 2016 application.

Working around this issue requires some fancy footwork: setting preferences for com.microsoft.autoupdate2 to prevent it from launching automatically, or using an installer choice changes XML to selectively disable Microsoft Auto Update (MAU) from installing at all. The latter won’t help much if Office 2011 has already been installed, because Office 2011 includes the same Auto Update application, and the 2016 applications will attempt to register themselves with it on first launch. Another option, which requires no modification to the installation configuration, is to instead create a custom script to run the same lsregister command, and run this script by every user at login time, deployed using a tool such as outset.

Admins have also gone the route of simply deploying the standalone “update” packages instead of the base application, as these don’t include the MAU components at all. This is also all documented thoroughly in my earlier post.

These advanced workarounds - repackaging, recombining, reconfiguring and “augmenting” with additional LaunchAgents - are all excellent examples of things that should never be required by an IT administrator for mainstream software. These techniques are typically only needed for niche applications made by software vendors whose release engineers have little interest in understanding the conventions and tools available for the OS platform. Adobe is obviously the one glaring exception here.

The audit by Duncan McCracken at MacSysAdmin 2015

Last week the MacSysAdmin 2015 conference took place in Göteborg, Sweden. Duncan McCracken, whose company Mondada offers a paid Mac packaging service, spent the latter half of his presentation deconstructing the Office 2016 installer.

A video recording of Duncan’s presentation, as well as some his resources used in the demo, can be found at the MacSysAdmin 2015 documentation page (or here for a direct link of the video).

Because Mondada specializes in packaging as a service, Duncan is an expert at doing packages properly, and is experienced with fixing the mistakes made by commercial vendors who don’t properly implement the tools made available by the Installer framework and packaging tools on OS X. Somewhat of a perfectionist, Duncan is used to completely disassembling and re-assembling a flawed package (or one that uses a custom packaging engine - see his 2010 MacSysAdmin Installer Packages session for an example) to make it as “correct” as possible, and using the appropriate mechanisms available in the Installer framework to perform whatever custom logic may be necessary.

The Office 2016 package deconstruction begins roughly halfway into the video. As someone who’s all-too-familiar with problematic installer packages (and Office 2016’s in particular), I found the session extremely entertaining. The parts of Duncan’s demos that didn’t go so well were supposedly caused by a misconfigured (or broken?) shell binary in his OS X VM he was using in the demonstration, and that the process he went through to re-assemble the installer package should otherwise have resulted in a successful installation.

Given that Mac IT admins are still in this awkward phase where OS X El Capitan is now shipping on all new Mac hardware, Outlook 2011 effectively cannot run on El Capitan, and organizations are feeling pressure to deploy Office 2016 as soon as possible, it’s unfortunate that the Office 2016 installer still requires so much “fixing.” I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Office is the single most commonly deployed commercial software in organizations.

That Duncan dedicated nearly half of his session to this installer package is a testament to how far IT admins need to go simply to deploy software in a manner that provides a trouble-free experience for users. Software vendors do not have a clue that we do this - so don’t think that they are “out to get you” - but when software becomes this hard to deliver to users, it’s time to push back and give real-world examples of the contexts in which we install software and details of the workarounds we implement. You may well better understand the implications of sudo -u $USER in postinstall scripts than the release engineers do, so educate them!

There’s even contact info in a comment from my previous post. If you don’t have an expensive enough agreement with Microsoft (we don’t), it can otherwise be challenging to get a fruitful contact with the engineering team, so this is an opportunity to provide direct feedback.

• What's Wrong with the Office 2016 Volume License Installer? –
• Disabling First-run Dialogs in Office 2016 for Mac –
• Adobe Creative Cloud Deployment - Packaging a License File –
• How to Package Profiles –

Soon Microsoft are to release an update to the Office 2016 Volume License installer on VLSC.

This update is 15.17 & is the first that has a few changes that may affect the way you deploy Office 2016.

These changes are going to be later enforced in 15.20 & onwards. Below are some details on the changes, some of the why & how via the power of the MacAdmins.org Slack & the awesome @pbowden that some of us have had a sneak peek.

Contents

• 1 What’s Changing?

When you download the .iso from VLSC you’ll notice two packages within it:

The change is the new second pkg: “Microsoft_Office_2016_VL_Serializer.pkg”

What’s that about?

Well, for a while now it’s been fairly common practice to deploy the Office license to Macs outside of the Office installers or updates.

This came about as on occasion an Office Update or Installer would delete the file.

However, whilst the deletion itself was a bug, the ability to use the license.plist across Macs was also a bug.

What is it & should I use it?

Office 2016 Mac License Installer 64-bit

With Office 2016, Microsoft are moving to a device based serialisation method. Which means that deploying the plist /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingv2.plist will no longer work.

This device based serialisation is based around the generating a license on the Mac that is to be running Office 2016.

Microsoft Office 2016 Mac Download

So if you employ monolithic imaging or deploy Office 2016 via a Composer snap shot etc, the serialisation will not work. (Please don’t deploy Office 2016 via a Composer snap shot, use the pkg).

Also, if you install Office 2016 whilst booted to another volume (as in when installing via a NetBoot or NetInstall volume or something like Target Mode Imaging), again the serialisation will not work.

To install Office 2016 from another volume & have the serialisation work, cache it locally on the Mac being imaged & install on first boot or if using Casper Imaging check “Install on boot drive after Imaging” for the PKG from within Casper Admin.

However, to enable Office 2016 to be correctly licensed in the multitude of deployment scenarios that we mac admins employ, @pbowden & his team have created the “Microsoft_Office_2016_VL_Serializer.pkg”

Running this will correctly serialise the Office 2016 suite, & should be run from the Mac that’s running the suite. So again, can be added post imaging & then the suite will be correctly serialised.

To be clear, this will only affect you if using the Volume Licensed version of Office 2016 & not the Office365 version.

What happens if I carry on copying the licensing.plist?

For now, not much.

15.17 is the first release with the “Microsoft_Office_2016_VL_Serializer.pkg”, from 15.20 (scheduled for Q1 2016) you will have to use the correct license.

How did people find this out?

Well a little over a month ago a gentleman with the nick @pbowden hopped into the #microsoft-office channel on the MacAdmins.org Slack, this was awesome as @pbowden is a: Software engineer for Office for Mac/iOS at Microsoft, a fellow Brit & nice guy.

It’s been a great few weeks with the community sharing feedback with @pbowden & some of us being able to test pre-release installers for Office.

I hope this warning has been as helpful to you, as it was when @pbowden shared it with us.