office 365 patching

@jbosma Without sounding bad here...I wish you could have attended @pbowden 's excellent session on patching/installing/licensing Office for Mac 2016 and learned about Microsoft's SKU-less Office 2016 product.

@john_wetter , is there any hope that someone video taped part of Paul's session about updating and patching Office. After attending that and looking back over the patch management stuff in the current release, I believe we have everything we need already in the JSS. The full download updates contained at http://macadmins.software seem to contain updates for all the Office 2016 builds and Paul's presentation covered the ins and outs of trying to get the delta updates (which should work the same for retail, Office 365, volume builds) but are crafted to take you from one build number to another only.

Paul outlined some good strategies on how to choose the various updates in the session. Finally, Microsoft is a couple of months away from releasing a scriptable MAU that lets the individual clients pull whichever download they need from either the Microsoft CDN or in Paul's tools, there is a method to stand-up a local caching server for MS Office updates.

Not having a video of the session to provide, I can recommend going to http://macadmins.software
for a fully updated listing of all MS Office 2016 for Mac, OneDrive for Mac downloads, etc. are there and if you look at the top of the page, you can find many of Paul's scripts for working with it. Finally, there is no better info than Paul Bowden himself. His role at Microsoft is specializing in deployment/installation/updating/licensing Office 2016 for Mac. He actively monitors the MacAdmins group on Slack and is a very approachable guy who has helped me get things going right.

Hi @blackholemac, Paul is giving the same presentation on November 16th at the University of Utah and it will be recorded there. Due to some of the early nature of the content this time, we weren't able to record and post it. It will be also a live stream so questions might be accepted there as well if there are some. It looks like MAU has a lot coming so a combination of the two look to be very possible and helpful.

Thanks for the info. i did talk with jamf support and they said that office 365 is on the short list for new titles in their patch management. they recommended that I post the new feature request.
I'll try to check out Paul's presentation.

@john_wetter Thank you for pointing that gentleman to the University of Utah presentation in November and such. Paul's UG session at JNUC was really informative and I hope Microsoft continues to go in the direction he discussed. Office 2016 as a SKU-less package should end up being one of my lower maintenance packages going forward in a few months.

Did anybody ask about Office's availability in the apps store? VPP would be the best possibility !!

C

He did comment explicitly on that. If folks notice, the Office apps are built with the App Store in mind (i.e.. sandboxing and such), they even quietly submitted MS Word to Apple for approval but never published it through the store according to Paul Bowden in that session.

The reason they don't post to the App Store they say is simple...they want a single Get button that fires off a download of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. In other words they want the whole suite downloaded for one Get button. For folks thinking it was money issues, they already sell Office 365 subscriptions through the store on the iOS side so it's likely not that.

At least that's why they say they haven't published it. Personally I like having it both in and out of the store. Having options is a good thing...specifically if I want to land us on a specific build that may not be the most recent available for whatever reason.

Upvoting this - we disable MS AutoUpdate so that we can control the updates through Self Service. And we update the whole suite instead of the individual pieces. But there doesn't seem to be a way to really do this with Patch Policies. I can pick one app out of the suite (Word or Outlook since they're the most used), change the display name to Microsoft Office, and scope the patch policy to smart group's i've already written. But the patch policy will only quit the original target app of the policy (Word or Outlook as mentioned).

Adding the full Office suite (2016/365) to Patch Management would be appreciated.

Does anyone know if this will be implemented soon?
Since apparently it is in the short list since 10/2016 :) and now there are two different versions out.

Thanks

We absolutely need this now that 2016 and 365 versions have diverged with this month's updates.

Upvoting this !!
Adding the full Office suite (2016/365) to Patch Management would be appreciated.

Thx

Hello everyone!

Given that Microsoft Office 2016 and 365 have split up their versioning we will be creating separate definitions specifically for Office 365.

Quick question out there for the community, would it be preferential to use the historical versions of the definitions from Office 2016 or would you all rather these be new Software Titles from scratch starting with this recent release of Office 365?

Thanks!

Jonathon

From my end, would absolutely prefer to keep historical versions. We're on the 16.16 (non-365) track, and I'd rather not have to re-do my definitions/policies for each app if I don't have to.

My preference would also be keeping 2016's history on this theoretical new set of 365 titles. In my mind, I'd always viewed them as separate update tracks that always just happened to be on the same exact version.

@tehBob was kind enough to make an O365 communitypatch source, thanks @tehBob !

O365 - 15.x-16.16 and continue with 16.17+
VL - 15.x - 16.16 and continue with 16.16.x+

The 2016 and 2019 labels don't mean too much and could be confusing.

Admins will just have to be aware that prior to 16.16 that the apps and system requirements are the same. We shouldn't expect JAMF to discover what licence type is deployed

@robinsonjo I'm cool with a split title as well - but I really need this ASAP please! I have several things built around Patch Title versioning for MS apps, and now none of it is working because of the lack of patch titles.

If there's room on the list for Enterprise Connect as well I'd love to see that - but I'd gladly forego that to hurry up and get O365 working again!

Reposting this here from a similar discussion on 9/20/18:

Hi folks!

Just giving you a quick unofficial update on Jamf Pro and patch definitions.

Because Microsoft Office for Mac transitioned this month from the "2016" generation to the "2019" generation, the versions are now forked for a while. That means going forward some folks remaining with the "2016" generation will see "16.16.1", "16.16.2", etc., while others moving to the "2019" generation will see "16.17", "16.18", etc.

We've had to evaluate how to handle the change and how best to present it to you in Jamf Pro. The engineer working on this hopes to get this resolved very soon. Patch definitions come from our jamf-patch server (they're not built-in to Jamf Pro), which means you should see the updates in your Jamf Pro servers shortly after we update here.

We'll post an announcement about the new definitions here on Jamf Nation.

Jamf would need to have 3 patch titles:
Office 2016 15.x - 16.16.x
Office 2019 - 16.17 until it's EOL
Office 365 - 15.x and later

At some point the same thing that happened with 2016 will happen with 2019 as well. And yes there will be overlapping version history between the three titles. That shouldn't matter though.

Hello folks!

The Office Definitions have had their Software Title name changed to just "Microsoft Office Excel/Word/Outlook etc" without the year included.

Moving forward, the Office Suite will continue to be updated as normal with the 2019 perpetual licenses: 16.17, 16.18, 16.19 etc.

We will also include any updates for the 2016 perpetual licenses: 16.16.1, 16.16.2, 16.16.3 etc.

There is one other spot in the definitions that still shows "2016" within the definition itself, that will be fixed in an upcoming release, this is purely cosmetic.

The latest "2019" version will always be listed as the Latest Version. If the latest 2019 version always being in the position as Latest Version is not the most ideal situation for some Admins, we'd recommend creating a feature request for a standalone 2016 suite of updates.

Thank you!

Jon

@robinsonjo And what happens when Microsoft releases Office 2022(insert the next volume license release)?

@robinsonjo THANK YOU! This solves my current problem. :) It may be that you guys need a better plan for the next fork, but at least we have patch titles working again.

@bpavlov - Good question. If the circumstances are similar and the applications have not changed substantially then we will go the same direction that we took today. It will all depend on the changes made to the applications themselves. (Bundle ID, Application Name, etc).

@chris.kemp - Glad we could help. If the future changes done to Microsoft Office are similar to what happened last week, it should be considerably faster. Whenever we make major modifications to any definitions we need to perform quality assurance testing on each and every single one of them to ensure nothing goes wrong in existing environments. That can often times be the spot where we spend the most time.

Thank you!!

Jon

entered feature request to get the Office 2016 track listed