![]() The latter won’t help much if Office 2011 has already been installed, because Office 2011 includes the same Auto Update application, and the 2016 applications will attempt to register themselves with it on first launch. Working around this issue requires some fancy footwork: setting preferences for 2 to prevent it from launching automatically, or using an installer choice changes XML to selectively disable Microsoft Auto Update (MAU) from installing at all. The end result is that installing this package without other additional steps will result in a confusing “you are running this for the first time” prompt shown to users, triggered by the auto-update daemon, which is triggered automatically on the first launch of any Office 2016 application. The other major issue with the installer is that when it detects COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL, it skips the process of registering the Microsoft AU Daemon application (using an undocumented -trusted option) using lsregister, because this should be done as the user launching the app. ![]() Confusing security prompt for the auto-update daemon: still there I don’t see any reason why sudo -u $USER should be used at all in this case. The reason the Office VL installer fails at the loginwindow with ARD was already explained in the afore-linked post: ARD seems to set a USER environment value of nobody, and when their licensing tool runs it is run using sudo -u $USER, which seems to fail when the command is run as nobody. While ARD has a (deserved) reputation of being unreliable and is not suitable for ongoing management of Macs at a larger-than-small scale, it’s still an easy-to-set-up tool that you can point a software vendor to as a way to test how well their installers stand up to a typical mass deployment scenario. Unfortunately, they have not yet met what I’d consider the minimum requirement for a deployable installer: that it should be possible to deploy it with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). The latest release in the VL portal at this time of writing is 15.13.4, and it fixes the issue where the license activation (run by Microsoft Setup Assistant) assumed it could connect to a GUI session, which at the loginwindow it cannot. The Office for Mac team has made some progress with one of the major issues with this installer, which was its inability to run the license activation process while at the loginwindow. ![]() Running at the loginwindow: fixed, sort of ![]() In this post I’ll summarize two of the major issues and talk a bit about a conference session that was presented just this past week at MacSysAdmin 2015 by Duncan McCracken. I have previously documented a couple major issues with the installer that impact those who deploy Office 2016 using automated means (meaning anything that doesn’t involve a user manually running the GUI installer). It is now over two months since Microsoft has made the Office for Mac 2016 Volume License installer available for customers in the VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) portal. ![]()
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