How to: Office 365 Client Upgrade/Rollout

This article is part of my Sysadmin series (Not my day job) where I share some hints and tips from my other life as a sysadmin.

My organisation is moving into Azure cloud with 0365 and therefore needed to remove old the Microsoft Office suite (2010,2013,2016)
Unfortunately uninstalling Office via standard MSI calls or Microsoft’s very own /adminfile never gave us a clean removal and always made it hard to upgrade our user workstations en masse.

Fortunately Microsoft have provided a method for removing old versions of their office suite before installing 2016 (365).
There is documentation from Microsoft but it was hard to find and understand, until we found this.

The new installation customisation tool is very similar to the old Office .MSP transforms but this time around its a plain old .XML
You just need a good text editor. I recommend Notepad++

Step 1:

Download Office 365 installation media from here.

Step 2

Extract the contents of the .exe with a 7Zip or similar.

Step 3

Open Microsoft Customization Tool here and tune your preferences for installation.

Setting those settings

If you require any hints for settings please go to the very end of the tutorial.

If you are upgrading your endpoints from a previous version of office (2010 for example) be sure to enable these options. They tell the installation to remove old versions.

Update and Upgrade Options for the installation.

Step 4

Once you have finished your customization, export the XML file.

Export button (In case you missed it)

Step 5

Drop your new XML into the same directory as your setup.exe

Now you have everything you need to rollout O365 to our endpoints.
You can call installation from this directory or via your favorite deployment tool with the following command line:

setup.exe /configure Configuration.xml

Setup.exe will use Microsoft's CDN to pull down the O365 media and install it.

Office installation media pulling down O365 media and installing.

Extra curricular

There are a few settings which can benefit your rollout that are not glaringly obvious in the customisation tool. Here is a copy of the XML we used for our rollout.

<Configuration>
<Add OfficeClientEdition=”64" Channel=”Monthly” AllowCdnFallback=”TRUE” ForceUpgrade=”TRUE”>
<Product ID=”O365ProPlusRetail”>
<Language ID=”MatchOS” />
<ExcludeApp ID=”Groove” />
</Product>
</Add>
<Property Name=”SharedComputerLicensing” Value=”1" />
<Property Name=”PinIconsToTaskbar” Value=”FALSE” />
<Property Name=”SCLCacheOverride” Value=”0" />
<Updates Enabled=”TRUE” />
<RemoveMSI All=”TRUE” />
<AppSettings>
<User Key=”software\microsoft\office\16.0\firstrun” Name=”disablemovie” Value=”1" Type=”REG_DWORD” App=”office16" Id=”L_DisableMovie” />
<User Key=”software\microsoft\office\16.0\firstrun” Name=”bootedrtm” Value=”1" Type=”REG_DWORD” App=”office16" Id=”L_DisableOfficeFirstrun” />
</AppSettings>
<Display Level=”Full” AcceptEULA=”TRUE” />
<Logging Level=”Standard” Path=”c:\logs” />
</Configuration>

Switches worth mentioning

This setting disables the irritating First Run introduction move thing for users:

<User Key=”software\microsoft\office\16.0\firstrun” Name=”disablemovie”

The next disables the entire first run exprience at first login

<User Key=”software\microsoft\office\16.0\firstrun” Name=”bootedrtm” Value=”1" Type=”REG_DWORD” App=”office16" Id=”L_DisableOfficeFirstrun” />

Keeps your endpoints up to date automatically
<Updates Enabled=”TRUE” />

Removes old versions of office

<RemoveMSI All=”TRUE” />