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Office Deployment Tool – Click to Run

By default, Office 365 ProPlus installs as one package which means that ALL programs are installed: Access, Excel, InfoPath, Lync, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word.  With the Office Deployment Tool you can elect to EXCLUDE certain apps from being installed.

This tool has also been presented as the “Shared Activation Tool for RDS” however, it is not expected to make its appearance as such until the second half  of 2014:

“Shared Computer Activation for Office 365 ProPlus is targeted to release in the second half of 2014 and will support Office 365 ProPlus installation on Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer with the RDS enabled. It will also work in cases where users share computers with unique Windows user profiles.”

As an IT Administrator you have the ability to provide Office 365 ProPlus to your users in a couple of ways.  You could make it available from the Office 365 Portal.  Easy yes but users will need to be local administrators on their computers in order to install the product.  Or… You could deploy Office 365 ProPlus from an on-premises location which would provide for a more secure and granular deployment process where you set:

  • Which individual Office programs are installed
  • Where on the network Office 365 ProPlus is installed from
  • How Office 365 ProPlus is updated after it is installed
  • Which computers Office 365 ProPlus is installed on
  • Which users, if any, get the 64-bit version of Office 365 ProPlus
  • Which languages are available to install

This is a good TechNet article that describes fully the benefits of both.

Here is a quick look at the Office Deployment Tool and how it can be configured

1) Download the tool from Microsoft Download Center

2) Extract the files to a temporary folder IE> C:ToolsODT

3) Open and edit the Configuration.xml file (syntax reference)

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This is the default file.  To use you will need to remove the  <! —    and    –>  characters
first.  From there you can configure a number of options.

  • Set Source Path (network share, https or local path)  If no source path is specified setup will attempt to create an OfficeData… folder structure in the working directory from which you are running setup.exe
  • Set 32 bit or 64 bit
  • Add or remove products from the installation using <ExcludeApp ID=/> Tag
  • Add or remove languages from the installation
  • Specify display options
  • Set logging options
  • Specify software updates behavior for Click-to-Run

4) Once the configuration file is configured open a command prompt from the setup.exe location and execute Office 365 ProPlus Download

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5) When download is complete proceed to run the actual deployment/configuration

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Trouble Shooting Tips

  1. If you receive a “Setup cannot proceed error” check to ensure your configuration.xml syntax is Correct and that you are installing the correct Bitness 32 or 64.  I have seen some unresolved forum discussions about this “misleading” error message which more often than not points to incorrect syntax in your configuration.xml file
  2. If your users experience issues when attempting to install from a network share ensure that the source location is configured to ALLOW the “Domain Computers Group” the following permissions
  • Read & Execute
  • List Folder Contents
  • Read