MS Office 365 and Activation

mconners
Valued Contributor

Hello Everyone,

Sorry if this is a duplicate, but we are in a little bit of a panic state.

Previously, we have been installing Office 2016 for Mac along with a license key via the serialization file installation mentioned in many other places. This has worked flawlessly and continues to work well.

Today, we discovered a problem. When in Outlook 2016 on the Mac, there isn't a way to see an option to attach read receipts to the a new message. The button is physically not there, at all. Contacting Microsoft Premier support, we discovered, our installation of Office 2016 for Mac was licensed as a volume license, we knew this.

I was told, we need to remove the existing licensing file and then have a user login with their Office 365 account which will then activate the license as an Office 365 license. WOW, really?

We have nearly 900 Macs and a few thousand users on these Macs. Is Microsoft thinking we have to de-activate our volume license and have individual users logging in and activating the Office 365 license manually?

Do any of you know of this and if you have worked around it, could you point us in the right direction? This seems a little crazy that Microsoft would think in our larger organizations with Mac admins that this wasn't considered.

Anyhow, thank you in advance...back to search we go.

6 REPLIES 6

rderewianko
Valued Contributor II

So @pbowden has a few scripts that may help you:
Office 2016 unlicense
O365 shared activator

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

Unfortunately, Microsoft knew exactly what it was doing. This isn't short-sightedness on their part. It's an intentional move to drive customers to Office 365 subscriptions. Licensing by activation through Office 365 is the only way to unlock a lot of extra features. See this list:

https://macadmins.software/matrix/

Developers like @pbowden and the other technical folks who interact with Mac admins didn't make this decision. They've helped us understand the motive and provided us the licensing scripts @rderewianko referenced above. This is purely sales. I can only urge you to contact your Technical Account Manager at Microsoft and make your voice heard if this adversely affects you.

GabeShack
Valued Contributor III

@mconners Hey also maybe check out this thread:
https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/24197/microsoft-volume-license-vs-o365-subscription-lic...

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

mconners
Valued Contributor

Thank you Everyone, this certainly leads me down the right path. I sure wish Microsoft would think differently....pun intended.

Malcolm
Contributor II

@mconners

It looks like they are moving macadmins to https://macadmins.software for the volume license version, which is a royal pain the ass, as being a government school our licensing is controlled by our department of education, which prevent us from directly accessing the download.

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

@Malcolm, the macadmins.software site doesn't host any downloads. It's just a convenient page that points to all the official Microsoft links. Volume license downloads still remain in the Volume License Service Center (VLSC).