Recently I was made aware that Microsoft through their AutoUpdate tool has made Microsoft Office patches a lot smaller in the last several patches. @talkingmoose recently identified this on Twitter which led me to look into it further.
My current workflow when updates are released for Microsoft Office is roughly the following:
- Download the update pkgs from https://macadmins.software/.
- Upload these to Jamf Pro via Jamf Admin.
- Delete my current patch policies for each Office application.
- Delete my current patch definitions for each Office application.
- Add the new patch definitions for each Office application.
- Create new patch policies for each Office application.
For the latest round on Nov 12, 2019 each download with that method was:
- Microsoft Word: 1.0GB
- Microsoft Excel: 780MB
- Microsoft PowerPoint: 700MB
- Microsoft Outlook: 765MB
- Microsoft OneNote: 408MB
According to @talkingmoose's post he linked to https://macadmins.software/updatesize/. The update size here is a lot more attractive by using Microsoft AutoUpdate. I did some checking and found https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/mac/update-office-for-mac-using-msupdate. My misgivings about using this would be that we would no longer leverage our distribution points and be consuming more external bandwidth. Is there a way to leverage this with internal servers? We utilize caching servers for App Store updates and downloads which has worked out very well for us.
I'm interested in how different workflows look like for accomplishing updates with Microsoft Office.
