Office IT Pro Blog

Office 365 deployment center

About the Garage Series hosts:

By day, Jeremy Chapman works at Microsoft, responsible for optimizing the future of Office client and service delivery as the senior deployment lead. Jeremy’s background in application compatibility, building deployment automation tools and infrastructure reference architectures has been fundamental to the prioritization of new Office enterprise features such as the latest Click-to-Run install. By night, he is a car modding fanatic and serial linguist. He first met Yoni Kirsh, founder of the Australian-based deployment services company Fastrack Technology, back in 2007 at a Microsoft customer desktop advisory council. Yoni's real-world experience managing some of the largest Client deployments for the Asia Pacific region has helped steer the direction of the new Office. Additionally, Yoni is an aviation enthusiast and pilot. Both Jeremy and Yoni are respected technical speakers and between them have over 20 years of experience in the deployment and management of Microsoft Office and Windows clients. They are also leading experts in the transition to Office as a service.

The new Office Garage Series: Automating User Provisioning in Office 365

Garage Series for IT Pros — Tue, 14 May 2013 20:51:00 GMT

This week our hosts address one of the most visible changes to the new Office desktop apps - sign in experience for the service. Jeremy and Yoni draw out the identity architecture on the PPI to show the main options. Then they demonstrate how to get users into an organization's Office 365 identity store and how to grant specific users access to Office 365 services. You'll see how to do all of this manually or using scripted automation solutions with PowerShell cmdlets. They catch up with Trustworthy Computing Lead for Office, Keith Yedlin, to talk about security and they show the single sign on experience with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). In this week's XStream install Yoni takes on the water as he tries to install Office 365 ProPlus before a wakeboarder takes a spill.

<a title="The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Automating User Provisioning in Office 365" href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=0091779b-3d30-48ef-aaa4-448dc01b331f&src=v5:embed:syndication:" target="_new" data-mce-href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=0091779b-3d30-48ef-aaa4-448dc01b331f&src=v5:embed:syndication:">Video: The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Automating User Provisioning in Office 365</a>

Add an ICS reminder to your calendar to tune in each Wednesday 9am PST. We redirect the www.microsoft.com/garage link each week to go to the latest episode.

Jeremy: Last week we went deeper on the anatomy of software updates in Click-to-Run-delivered Office 365 ProPlus. Remember, many of those concepts translate to all Office 2013 consumer products and Office 365 Home Premium as well as Office 365 Small Business Premium, which all use Click-to-Run servicing. Office 365 ProPlus is unique compared to other Office versions because it also allows IT administrators to control which Office build is installed, where updates are pulled from and whether the update service is enabled or not.

Yoni: The software update controls give IT the ability to test, validate and roll-back updates as needed. That is super important for IT especially when they have third party or in-house solutions built and they need to make sure those are compatible before they roll an update into production.

Jeremy: This week we tackle a very visible topic in a services-based world where the user is at the center - Identity Management. We covered this at a foundational level in Episode 4 when we had Mark Russinovich on the show. Identity management is one of the biggest mental hurdles in adapting to a user-based model. It also provides the foundation for many of the benefits users see, like roaming settings, access to their email and Office files on almost any device and the ability to install Office on five PCs or Macs.

Yoni: As I talk to my peers and customers, a lot of them are thrilled about the prospect of user-based licensing and how that can impact costs and accounting in a world of multiple devices per user. On the flipside, they are typically unsure of what that means and how it impacts the way they manage desktop services. In many people's minds, they want to buy via user-based licensing and deploy with a more anonymous Key Management Service (KMS). But for many reasons this cannot work and there is no way to connect the user to his or her files without their identity somehow being involved to create the relationship between them and their data. Imagine trying to use social networking services like Facebook or Twitter anonymously or applying for a credit card without giving your name. Services need something to tie the person back to their organization.

Jeremy: In Office's case, it also means we can eliminate the need to otherwise hand out 5x5 keys. Users not only can access services, but they can also activate Office on up to five devices and manage those devices using their Organizational ID. Microsoft provides tools to import and synchronize user objects from an existing Active Directory environment, perform bulk CSV list imports or use custom PowerShell scripts to populate the identity store with User Principle Names and required directory attributes. We mapped out all of the primary options on the PPI display and then demonstrated these tools in action.

Yoni: One thing people often overlook is that once the users are in the store, they need to purchase then assign licenses to various Office 365 services, like the Office 365 ProPlus desktop applications. We showed how licenses for services are assigned manually in the portal. But assuming you've set up Directory Synchronization and maybe even Single Sign On with ADFS, then you probably want to automate the process of assigning licenses and for that we use the Set-MsolUserLicense cmdlet.

Jeremy: The final frontier from an automation perspective is really to set up ADFS and single sign-on as a way to ensure that your policies for password updates and the service authentication itself integrates with your existing tools and policies. The best place to go for all of this is the Office 365 deployment center on TechNet. It walks you through the right solution depending on your organization size and needs.

Yoni: Of course the Office 365 deployment center and more key resources are listed below. This week we also took to the water in this week's XStream install. I wanted to find out if Office 365 ProPlus could install without an Internet connection on a boat before our stuntman took a spill in a local river. You will need to watch the video to see if that worked out. If you watched last week, Sydney traffic managed to beat our Click-to-Run install, so anything can happen.

Jeremy: Luckily our stunt man didn't encounter any crocodiles during this week's stunt.

Next week we'll cover the major desktop virtualization options and how you can use the new Office - both the traditional volume license packages and the new Office 365 ProPlus packages - with desktop virtualization solutions. Also, if you are coming to Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans on June 3-6, we'll be filming shows live from the Office show floor. We are going beyond the Office desktop apps to show the best of Exchange, SharePoint, apps for Office, Lync, touch and large screen experiences and the integration across all of these solutions.

See you next week,

Jeremy and Yoni

More Resources:

Manage Windows Azure Active Directory by using Windows PowerShell

Directory synchronization roadmap

Garage Series for IT Pros Archive of previous episodes

Office 365 ProPlus Administrator Series: Client Deployment Options

About the Garage Series hosts:

New Office Web Apps Server poster and content roadmap

Catherine Watson — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

We’ve published two new resources to help you learn about Office Web Apps Server and to help you find the content you need to plan, deploy and manage Office Web Apps Server.

Also, if you'd like to see what's involved in deploying Office Web Apps server to use with SharePoint 2013, watch the video demo that we published a few months ago.

Let us know what you think of these resources by leaving a comment or sending us a note to feedork@microsoft.com.

- Cat

The new Office Garage Series: Anatomy of Office Software Updates in Click-to-Run

Garage Series for IT Pros — Wed, 08 May 2013 01:47:00 GMT

This week adventurous hosts go deeper on how software updates really work for the new Office. They attempt to demystify what’s different compared to the Office Professional Plus 2013 MSI install and explain the optimized update service for the Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run install. They also explain how the service works in cases where you might want to test, validate and publish updates either on premises or use the default Office content delivery network (CDN) and see how to go beyond default settings. Plus, Jeremy talks to Jefferson Criddle from the Office engineering team and Yoni gets behind the wheel in a Ferrari F430 Spider to see if he can beat Sydney, Australia traffic in today’s XStream Install.

<a title="The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Anatomy of Office Software updates" href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=e11453f7-805c-4959-8300-6e5c6de12a7a&src=v5:embed:syndication:" target="_new" data-mce-href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=e11453f7-805c-4959-8300-6e5c6de12a7a&src=v5:embed:syndication:">Video: The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Anatomy of Office Software updates</a>

Add an ICS reminder to your calendar to tune in each Wednesday 9am PST. We redirect the www.microsoft.com/garage link each week to go to the latest episode.

Jeremy: Last week we wrapped up our three-part series on Click-to-Run configuration and deployment with on premises software distribution tools. I took to the streets to see if I could install Office via Windows Intune in my car PC while tethered to my mobile phone before I crossed the 520 bridge in Seattle.

Yoni: Importantly we showed how you would customize Click-to-Run with the Office Deployment Tool and Group Policy. We also showed install-time configurations you can make by calling different configuration XML files depending on what you need using tools like System Center Configuration Manager and Windows Intune for standalone Office installation or Microsoft Deployment Toolkit as part of a Windows image deployment. This week we'll discuss another aspect that you set at install-time but need to manage ongoing - software updates in the new Office.

Jeremy: You'll often hear people use the phrase “always-up-to-date” when they describe Office 365 ProPlus. The design of the service is to not allow Office desktop applications to ever go more than a year out of date. For many users and in all self-installation scenarios, updates will stream regularly from the Office 365 public service. Managed organizations with Office 365 ProPlus have control over the update process to ensure that software updates do not introduce compatibility or similar issues prior to authorizing software updates for their managed PCs.

Yoni: With Click-to-Run, tools like Microsoft Update and the traditional MSP files are not involved in software updates as they are with MSI-based Office packages. Likewise, management tools like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and products controlling WSUS like System Center Configuration Manager are not distributing software updates to Click-to-Run . Instead, to support the application virtualization underpinnings and enable background updating something different was developed.

Jeremy: Yes, the engine had to change in this case to support Click-to-Run. In many ways updating is a lot more predictable. As the engine is checking more frequently for updated Office builds, we are seeing more success discovering and applying updates with Click-to-Run. I blogged about that a few months back on the Office 365 Community Technical Blog and highlighted all of the configuration XML controls used to take over the software update process if you do not want to use the default auto-updating behavior.

Yoni: There are really three options when it comes to software updates with Click-to-Run and these options are controlled via the Office Deployment Tool's configuration XML file:

Automatic updates from the Office CDN
Automatic updates from a managed file share or http:// source location
Manual updates by re-running Office setup with newer builds

In all three options, the update service will look if there is a build of Office already installed, compare that to the build Office is trying to update to, then only transfer the delta of what is required. Jeremy sketched this process out on the PPI display in the show.

Jeremy: And Yoni showed the update experience on his computer. He also took to the streets and brutally one-upped my car from the last episode and installed Office in a Ferrari F430 Spider - and had nicer weather to boot. You'll have to see the show to find out how that went.

Yoni: So next week, we'll cover a topic core to this release of Office - automating user and service provisioning. We'll go quite a bit deeper than we did earlier in the season and show both the manual and scripted ways using PowerShell to add users and assign licenses to the Office service.

See you next week.

Jeremy and Yoni

More Resources:

Deploy Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool

Garage Series for IT Pros Archive of previous episodes

Deployment Options for Office 365 ProPlus

About the Garage Series hosts:

The new Office Garage Series: Click-to-Run Customization and Deployment Deep Dive Part 3 - Integration and Automation with Software Distribution Tools

Garage Series for IT Pros — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:45:00 GMT

This week marks the third in a three part series as hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh take the concepts from installing and configuring Office Click-to-Run in the first two parts and integrate those with software distribution tools like System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Windows Intune. They demonstrate the specific commands used with standalone software installation or part of the Windows imaging process and Jeremy tests whether he can stream Office to his car PC while WiFi-tethered with his phone before he crosses Seattle's famous floating bridge on Interstate 520.

<a title="The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Click-to-Run integration (Part 3 of 3)" href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=273f70c4-98b1-4125-b92e-0c62ddd6386f&src=v5:embed:syndication:" target="_new" data-mce-href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=273f70c4-98b1-4125-b92e-0c62ddd6386f&src=v5:embed:syndication:">Video: The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Click-to-Run integration (Part 3 of 3)</a>

Add an ICS reminder to your calendar to tune in each Wednesday 9am PST. We redirect the www.microsoft.com/garage link each week to go to the latest episode.

Jeremy: Last week in part two out of three of our focus on managing and configuring the new Office, we talked about the workarounds you might use to block unwanted Office desktop applications from running and how you would install Office Click-to-Run in a multiple language environment. While Click-to-Run doesn't allow you to block certain components of Office from installing, there are ways to hide or block unwanted applications from running. I showed AppLocker in action to block Access from running.

Yoni: And if you don't have Windows Enterprise required to use AppLocker, Jeremy showed another way to block executables using the AppHelp Hard Block mechanism Windows uses. Probably not the cleanest approach to blocking an EXE, but if simply hiding paths into the application just won't do, you can use the same approach Windows uses to block apps. You might also want to look at App-V 5 with Office 365 ProPlus if you want to deselect Office apps altogether.

Jeremy: So this week we translate what we saw in episode 5's deployment race a few weeks back, but actually show how to get Configuration Manager, MDT and Windows Intune set up to automate the installation of Office 365 ProPlus on behalf of end users. Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run is installed via a setup.exe bootstrapper similar to the Office MSI packages so normal software distribution tools work to install Office.

Yoni: For tools like System Center Configuration Manager, Windows Intune or third party software distribution you can download and import Office Click-to-Run installation binaries, create packages (or Apps if you use ConfigMgr '12) and advertise them as you would any other application. We documented all of the silent install commands last week in Part 2 of this deep dive. Another thing you can do with Office 365 ProPlus is use these tools to send a small instruction set down to your Internet-connected endpoints and have them pull Office bits directly from the Office 365 CDN.

Jeremy: I blogged about that a few months back on the Office 365 Community Technical Blog with a video demo and it adds another option for distributing Office and saving your VPN bandwidth potentially for remote computers. You transfer around 250kb telling the end point what to install, including: build, architecture, and update behavior. Then the 700MB or so Office package is streamed from the Internet via the Office 365 CDN instead of using your software distribution infrastructure and a remote VPN connection.

Yoni: This week you demonstrated this option in your car using Windows Intune to install Office 365 ProPlus directly from the Office CDN. You'll have to check out this week's show to see how that went. And if the install from the Internet option isn't your cup of tea or you are in a market where Internet is charged by the amount of MB transferred, you may want to block installation of Office via the Internet. In that case, you can disallow user self-installation in the Office 365 Admin Portal and use software distribution infrastructure exclusively to ensure all Office 365 ProPlus installs happen within your LAN. The flexibility is there and the decision is yours to make.

Jeremy: There is another question we get a lot, "Can we put Office 365 ProPlus and Click-to-Run builds in our Windows images?"

Yes. Whether you preinstall Office in your image then capture it or whether you install Office at build time with a task sequence, both will work. If you are installing and capturing the image, Office has been tested to work fine after running Sysprep.exe. The main thing to remember in that case is you want to install, but not activate Office. So the procedure would be to

install and customize your Windows image,
install Office using the "setup.exe /configure .\configuration.xml" process,
run Sysprep.exe, then
capture with imagex.exe or dism.exe.

If you are using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit for imaging, there is another important point to remember. When Office installs using Click-to-Run the integratedoffice.exe process managing the installation is passed from the installation initiator account (in MDT it is the Administrator account) to the System Account after around 10% of the installation progress. That means the System Account also needs access to the deployment share or wherever you are pointing setup.exe via the SourcePath property to look for the Click-to-Run package. One thing I do here to ensure success is copy the installation package to the local hard drive of the target machine, then run setup. This is roughly how the Office MSI setup uses the hidden C:\MSOCache folder to stage installation files.

On the show I added two custom tasks to my MDT task sequence. This assumes I imported Office into the ".\Deploy\Applications\Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus\" directory in my MDT deployment share:

Task Name: Copy Office 365 ProPlus
Command: xcopy.exe "%deployroot%\Applications\Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus\*" "%SystemDrive%\Deploy\Applications\Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus\" /e

Task Name: Install Office 365 ProPlus
Command: "%SystemDrive%\Deploy\Applications\Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus\setup.exe" /configure "%SystemDrive%\Deploy\Applications\Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus\configuration.xml"

The nice thing about these tasks and using the %SystemDrive%\Deploy folder as a file cache location is that MDT's LTICleanup.wsf is run at the end of the MDT task sequence and deletes the Office installation source files automatically from the hard drive when the task sequence completes. If you use this approach as opposed to ensuring the System Account has access to Office source, these two custom tasks should be very late in your overall task sequence so MDT doesn't inadvertently set its %deployroot% variable at some point in the process to the %SystemDrive%.

Yoni: Of course there are a few ways to accomplish what Jeremy describes above and you can add controls to customize installation using install scripts or database variables to control language preferences, architecture, source and update locations, etc. by modifying which configuration.xml files are called by setup.

Jeremy: The sky is the limit and the nice thing about automation is that you tend to only need to know this stuff as long as it takes to build out your software distribution processes and task sequences, after that it just runs by itself.

Yoni: Be sure to check out the other two parts of this series if you are in the midst of figuring out how to customize and deploy Office 365 ProPlus:

Jeremy: That wraps up our three-part series on customization and deployment. Next week we'll go deep on the software update engine and available controls. Plus Yoni will get behind the wheel in a Ferrari F430 Spider as he looks to see if he can beat Sydney, Australia traffic in next week's XStream Install.

See you next week.

Jeremy and Yoni

More Resources:

Deploy Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool

Garage Series for IT Pros Archive of previous episodes

Watch a video on custom reporting
Read a how-to article on custom reporting

About the Garage Series hosts:

New Telemetry Dashboard article and video on custom reporting on TechNet

Jill_M [MSFT] — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:48:00 GMT

Find out how custom reports in Telemetry Dashboard help you create a customized view of Office telemetry data.

If you’ve used Telemetry Dashboard, you may have seen the Custom Report worksheet but didn’t quite know what it’s used for. After all, there’s already a ton of data in the dashboard—what more could you ask for? Well, if you’ve ever found yourself switching between worksheets to view data that’s related, you’ll want to check out our new resources on custom reporting. A custom report is essentially a PivotTable report where you can pull various telemetry data into a single worksheet. If you set labels (also called tags) when you deployed the agents, then the custom reports are even more powerful, because you can filter or sort data for subsets of users, like in the report shown below. This is a summary of unregistered ActiveX controls, and you can see the user name and business group for each of these solutions.

Check out the resources below to learn more about custom reports in Telemetry Dashboard:

While you’re getting acquainted with custom reports, we’re working on another blog post on advanced custom reporting. This will be useful for customers who want to create multiple custom reports outside of Telemetry Dashboard. This requires a number of steps for connecting to the database, creating a new table for issue-related data, and creating relationships between tables. So stay tuned for a more in-depth look at custom reporting here on the Office IT Pro blog.

If you find a great use for custom reports, let us know! We’re always eager to hear how our customers use our tools.

Jill

The new Office Garage Series: Click-to-Run Customization and Deployment Deep Dive Part 2 - Workarounds

Garage Series for IT Pros — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:04:00 GMT

This week marks the second in a three part series, as hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh, explore specific differences between the Office Professional Plus 2013 MSI and Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run install and potential workarounds for your Office configuration. They cover topics from removing and blocking applications from the Office suite, using multiple languages and disabling first run to changing update properties. And hear from lead Office set-up engineer, Paul Barr.

<a title="The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Workarounds for your Office Configuration (Part 2 of 3)" href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=7500ed74-90a2-4df7-8569-4b15429d8c08&src=v5:embed:syndication:" target="_new" data-mce-href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=7500ed74-90a2-4df7-8569-4b15429d8c08&src=v5:embed:syndication:">Video: The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Workarounds for your Office Configuration (Part 2 of 3)</a>

Add an ICS reminder to your calendar to tune in each Wednesday 9am PST. We redirect the www.microsoft.com/garage link each week to go to the latest episode.

Jeremy: Last week in part one out of three of our focus on managing and configuring the new Office, e we featured an epic XStream install where we challenged Yoni to install Office without an Internet connection doing High-G aerobatics. We also went deep on the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run and how it is used to download Office installation files, install Office with custom configurations or remove Click-to-Run installations with scripted or automated solutions. In this episode we'll talk about frequent and little known workarounds, language customization and removing all user prompts from an Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run installation.

Yoni: So a question I often get is how do I disable certain Office applications from installing. With the MSI you could use the Office Customization Tool to disable components from installing. In Click-to-Run you are installing at a suite or SKU level and to stop people from using them, you would need to first remove shortcuts to the unwanted apps. Then you can use things like AppLocker or similar tools to block executable files from running. If you deploy Office 365 ProPlus with App-V 5 you can prevent applications from installing as part of the Office suite.

Jeremy: We also talked about language management and how you would use language properties in the Office Deployment Tool's configuration XML to download and install Office in different languages. I spoke Mandarin this week and showed how woefully out of practice I am. Then we took a tour of some of the new Group Policy settings to disable user prompts at installation and first run.

Yoni: Right, and in those cases we usually want to remove the sign in if possible and just about all the user prompts and the awesome video we get on first run. And to do that, we need to specify a few settings in the configuration XML and in Group Policy.

Configuration XML - you just need to activate the commented out line in the sample file like this and that will turn off the installation displays and firstrun.exe:
<Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />

Group Policy - there are three main areas to look at - Disable First Run (this is %userprofile% based for each person logging in the first time), Disable "First things first" and Disable Sign-In. The Group Policy settings are as follows:

Disable First Run experience
User Configuration\
Microsoft Office 2013\
First Run Disable First Run Movie - Enabled
Disable Office First Run on application boot – Enable

Disable “First things First”
User Configuration\
Microsoft Office 2013\
  Privacy\
   Trust Center
    Disable Opt-in Wizard on first run – Enabled
    Enable Customer Experience Improvement Program – Disabled
    Allow including screenshot with Office Feedback - Disabled
    Send Office Feedback – Disabled
    Automatically receive small updates… - Disabled

Disable Sign-In (for cases where Single Sign-on ADFS is used)
User Configuration\
Microsoft Office 2013\
Miscellaneous
Block signing into Office – Enabled: Org ID Only

These settings will eliminate all user prompts and first run experiences, assuming you are training your users in advance of an Office deployment and you don't want them signing up for things like Customer Experience Improvement Program or sending Watson reports back to Microsoft.

Jeremy: Many of these settings are similar to the ones we would use in Office 2007 and Office 2010 to eliminate user prompts, first run experiences and feedback reporting, but there are a few more in the case of Office 365 ProPlus, because things like telling users about signing into Office are new and important in this release.

Next week we'll put the pieces together in the deep dive and show all of this working using System Center Configuration Manager for software distribution, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit with Windows imaging and Windows Intune.

In fact, tune in to see if I can out do Yoni as I take to the driver’s seat for our next XStream install stunt. I take on the challenge of installing Office 365 ProPlus via Windows Intune on my in-car PC tethered to my 4G Windows phone - all by the time it takes me to cross Seattle’s famous 520 floating bridge , so mark your calendars and tune in to see if I actually succeed.

See you next week.

Jeremy and Yoni

More Resources:

Reference for Click-to-Run configuration.xml file

Download Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool

Deploy Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool

Garage Series for IT Pros Archive of previous episodes

Reference for Click-to-Run configuration.xml file

About the Garage Series hosts:

An invitation to upcoming Ignite events

Chris Downs — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:00:00 GMT

Our friends over at the Office 365 Technical Blog have announced that the Exchange Online Protection team is adding extra sessions to the upcoming Ignite event in San Diego. According to the blog:

"These sessions will equip you with the knowledge you need to migrate from Postini and similar email filtering services to Exchange Online Protection. Experts from the EOP product team will be on hand, as well as Implementation Project Managers who have helped dozens of large enterprises successfully migrate to the service. Sessions will include a deep dive into EOP product capabilities, a step-by-step walk through of the deployment and migration process, and a discussion of tips and tricks to ensure successful deployments."

For more information about the schedule and how to register, check out the post on the Office 365 Technical Blog.

-Chris

Office 2010 SP2 Beta Now Available for Download

Catherine Watson — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:00:00 GMT

The beta for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 2 is available for download. For the details, see the Office Sustained Engineering blog post about the beta release.

You probably have your update process in place. But just in case, have a look at these resources:

Remember, after you apply updates to SharePoint 2010 Products or to Office Web Apps running on SharePoint 2010 Products, run the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard. Or, at a command line, on every server in the farm, run:

psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait

Happy patch testing!

The new Office Garage Series: Click-to-Run Customization and Deployment Deep Dive Part 1 with High-G Aerobatics

Garage Series for IT Pros — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:58:00 GMT

In this week's episode, hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh kick off a three-part series deep dive on customizing and deploying Office Click-to-Run packages. The first part of the series describes how the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run is used to download, install, uninstall and convert Office packages for use with Application Virtualization. Yoni also takes to the air and attempts an Office 365 ProPlus install - without Internet access - while performing outrageously high-G Aerobatics.

<a title="The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Managing Your Office Configuration (Part 1 of 3)" href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=bc312c9e-2377-42c8-bd6d-03121a52ba29&src=v5:embed:syndication:" target="_new" data-mce-href="http://www.microsoft.com/resources/technet/en-us/office/media/video/video.html?cid=otc&from=shareembed-syndication&VideoID=bc312c9e-2377-42c8-bd6d-03121a52ba29&src=v5:embed:syndication:">Video: The new Office: Garage Series for IT Pros - Managing Your Office Configuration (Part 1 of 3)</a>

Add an ICS reminder to your calendar to tune in each Wednesday 9am PST. We redirect the www.microsoft.com/garage link each week to go to the latest episode.

Jeremy: So last week we recapped our Garage Series Live! show with Paul Thurrott, Office engineers and early Office adopters to tell us their experiences. We demonstrated touch enhancements in the new Office desktop, web and modern apps; Yoni showed Lync running on the PC, phone and browser and we saw the System Center experience for deploying Click-to-Run packages. And we topped the show off with a little trivia challenge in the spirit of the weekly shows.

Yoni: This week we go into more comfortable territory and describe the underpinnings of the Office Deployment Tool and how everything works. I also got to push Office to its limits with this week's XStream Install during some high-G aerobatics. But before we get to that, lets talk about install-time customization with Click-to-Run.

A lot of my peers and people I would talk to during Customer Preview thought Click-to-Run packages were only installable over the web and that led to a bunch of concerns around making things work with existing imaging and deployment tools, whether users had the right accounts to self-install install apps and what the bandwidth requirements looked like. The Office Deployment Tool solves for most of these concerns.

Jeremy: Right, so the Office Deployment Tool brings that offline control back to IT so they can install Office for their end users regardless of the tools are processes they have in place. If you can run an elevated command with whatever you use to install software today, then you can install Office 365 ProPlus. The setup.exe in the tool has three primary controls:

1. Download - for downloading Office builds and languages
2. Configure - for installing and uninstalling Office
3. Packager - for converting Office 365 ProPlus for use with Application Virtualization (App-V) 5.0

The Office Deployment Tool also uses a configuration XML file to dictate what is downloaded and where to as well as how Office is set up on the the target PC. It's similar in concept to the configuration XMLs we used in the MSI world, but with properties optimized for Click-to-Run. We don't use the Office Customization Tool with Click-to-Run, but the overwhelming majority of configurations you would have made with that tool are enforceable via Group Policy.

Yoni: As for the ODT, there are a few must-read articles on TechNet you'll want to look at to get a grasp of what the tool does and how to configure Office at install time.

We'll cover language management and the Packager command for App-V in a couple of weeks.

Jeremy: I wanted to also provide a few sample configuration XML sample files for downloading and installing Click-to-Run packages and explain a couple of the lesser know points of the tool. The /download switch and accompanying XML properties are pretty straightforward, but there are a couple things you need to know.

SourcePath (which is optional) indicates the location to save the Click-to-Run source when you run the Office Deployment Tool in download mode. If you do not specify SourcePath, Setup will attempt to create an \Office \Data\... folder structure in the working directory from which you are running setup.exe.

Here are sample contents for a download configuration.xml file:

That will download the most recent package, but if you wanted to specify an older package, you could modify

the <Add...> line to look like this:

If you don't include the SourcePath property at all, it will save to the folder where ODT's setup.exe is located. You could also add Language ID lines within Product IDs:

That will let you download language support for all the languages your company supports.

Yoni: And with the /configure switch you can install or uninstall Office. Here are a few examples for XML contents:

Install Office 365 ProPlus:

In the same way, we can omit the SourcePath="" entirely and setup will look at the folder it is in for the Click-to-Run package and if it doesn't find it there, it will download the package from the Internet directly. Like above in our download example, you can include a Version property. If you include a Version property with the intent on keeping that version intact or waiting for you to publish a new build later, you need to disable automatic updates or point the updating engine to your update server location by including a line like the one below between the </Add> and </Configuration> lines in the XML:

And to uninstall an Office Click-to-Run build, you would use a configuration XML like this:

or, to remove everything Click-to-Run without specifying Product IDs:

Jeremy: We'll go deeper next week into things you can and can't do, as well as any common workarounds next week. But Yoni, this is your big week. You got to fly in a Extra 200 air race stunt plane. How did that work out?

Yoni: As a pilot, this a big deal. It's like the Formula 1 race car of stunt planes and is capable of extremely high G-forces. So I tested Office Click-to-Run to see if I could complete an install before I lost my lunch. You'll have to watch and find out the outcome. Special thanks to my friends at www.redbaron.com.au.

Jeremy: Tune in next week for part 2 of the 3-part deep dive on customization and deployment integration where we discuss a few more advanced configuration topics as well as a few common workarounds.

See you then.

-Jeremy and Yoni

More Resources:

Download Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool

Deploy Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool

Garage Series for IT Pros Archive of previous episodes