In this post, we are going to deploy Office 365 application through SCCM. Starting with SCCM 1806, Office Customization tool is integrated with Office 365 Installer. Hence you don’t need to download OCT (Office Customization tool) to further download the Office 365 binaries. This will be taken care by Office 365 Installer only.

Lets begin with creating Office 365 Application

Launch SCCM Console, navigate to Software Library \ Overview \ Office 365 Client Management, click on Office 365 Installer to launch Microsoft Office 365 Client Installation Wizard.

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Provide the name as “Office 365 ProPlus” and make sure to provide the content location path to an existing empty folder and click Next.

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Under “Microsoft Office 365 client settings” page, click on “Go to the Office Customization Tool” to launch OCT tool (this requires internet connection to launch OCT Toolkit).

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Under “Deployment Settings” , select architecture as 64-bit and under Office Suites choose “Office 365 ProPlus” , you will get following options to select under Products Office Suites:

  • Office 365 ProPlus
  • Office 365 Business
  • Office Professional Plus 2019 – Volume License
  • Office Standard 2019 – Volume License

We are proceeding with selection of Access, Excel, Skype for Business, Outlook, PowerPoint & Word.

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Under “Update channel”, select “Semi-Annual Channel” out of following 4 options (For more details on various channels click here ) along with versions available to be deployed:

  • Monthly Channel (Targeted)
  • Monthly Channel
  • Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)
  • Semi-Annual Channel
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Under “Languages“, select English (United States), we can select additional languages as well if required.

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Select “Pin icons to Taskbar” as Off because Office 365 installation is going to happen using System Context, even if we select as ON, it won’t Pin the icons.

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Under “Upgrade options“, lets select Remove Visio, Remove Project, Remove SharePoint Designer, Remove InfoPath as this can cause issue installing Office 365 product.

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Make sure to enable “Automatically accept the EULA” to fully automate the installation process.

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Under “General“, specify organization name and click Next.

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Click on “Review” to verify all the settings we have specified.

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Verify all “Configuration Settings” and click on “Submit” to generate the Configuration.xml file.

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Once OCT Tool is close, “Microsoft Office 365 client settings” page will become active, click on Next.

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We will be proceeding with the deployment as well, lets select “Yes” and continue. Proceed next few pages to move to Progress page which downloads the Office 365 Binaries from CDN (Content Delivery Network).

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Downloading of Office 365 Binaries can be verified through log patchdownloader.log located in Users temp directory.

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patchdownloader.log will show the downloading status as follows

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Modify Configuration.xml file

Navigate to source location of Office 365, you will see configuration.xml successfully downloaded. Right click and edit it with Notepad. As you can see “Display Level” is set to Full. We need to change this.

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Change “Display Level” to Basic, this behaviour will just show Office 365 installation progress without any user interference, we can use Display Level as “None” for a complete silent behaviour which is a good choice in production environment. However, lets proceed with Basic as Display level for demo purpose. Make a note of Product ID which is mentioned as “O365ProPlusRetail” which will further help us preparing Uninstall.xml

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How to uninstall Office 365 using command line

Let’s prepare Uninstall.xml which will be used in uninstall Office 365 command line. OCT Tool has generated Configuration.xml automatically, however we don’t have any xml related to uninstallation of Office 365. Lets copy Configuration.xml to a file Uninstall.xml. From Configuration.xml we are using Product ID so that we uninstalling the correct Product. Delete the existing content from Configuration.xml and copy / paste following content from below snippet:

<Configuration>
    <Remove>
        <Product ID=”O365ProPlusRetail”>
            <Language ID=”en-us”/>
        </Product>
    </Remove>
</Configuration>

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Make sure to update the DP as we have modified xml files now. Lets change the icon of Office 365 Icon which will be displayed in “Software Center”. Go to Applications properties, click on “Application Catalog”, click on Icon and navigate to source location of Office 365 ProPlus directory, select setup.exe as an icon.

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Logon to client system, launch “Software Center”, you will be able to “Office 365 ProPlus” within next 1 hour

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Initiate the installation, as we have select Display Level as Basic, this will show the installation progress with all application icons which are going to be installed.

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