Deploying Office 365 client using Microsoft

Hi all,

In this post I am going to explain a solution I have designed to overcome a customer’s requirement to deploy Office 365 click-to-run client to its existing workstation fleet. The customer in question is a small organization with approximately- 160 workstations (a mixture of Windows 7 and Windows 10 and currently does not have application deployment tools in place, but is going to migrating to Office 365 and also have EM+S licensing.

Included in EM+S is Microsoft Intune, so the decision was made to deploy the InTune agent to all workstation in the domain which can then be used to deploy the Office 365 client.

This gives us the high level steps of :

1. Deploy InTune client
2. Create Office 365 package
3. Deploy Office 365 using Intune

 

Deploy InTune client

To deploy the InTune client to all workstations we will be using a Group Policy Object as all the workstations are currently joined to an Active Directory domain. To achieve this the following steps will be undertaken :

1. Logon to the Intune portal (manage.microsoft.com)
2. Navigate to Admin -> Client Software Download
3. Click on the option to ‘Download Client Software’ – this will download a 13Mb zip file
4. Extract the client files to a local directory – c:\InTune
5. Extract the Microsoft_InTune_Setup.exe file using the command ‘c:\Intune\Microsoft_Intune_Setup.exe /extract c:\Intune’
6. Copy Files to a suitable network share – exclude the original Microsoft_Intune_Setup.exe file, there is no need to retain this now we have extracted the contents
7. Open GPMC                                
8. Create a new GPO and link to Domain root level
9. Modify GPO to deploy InTune agent as a software installation
10. Verify GPO is applied to client
11. Reboot client to initiate installation
12. Track client installation logs in c:\program files\Microsoft
13. Verify workstation is registered in the Intune console

 

Create an Office 365 installation package

Now we have the Intune client deployed we have the ability to deploy .exe and .msi files to our workstations. I personally like to use the GitHub Office 365 ProPlus | Install Toolkit to create an installer for Office 365 as I find the interface simple and intuitive.

https://officedev.github.io/Office-IT-Pro-Deployment-Scripts/XmlEditor.html

Here are the options I have chosen

1. Create a new installer
2. Select the product options for deployment
3. Choose the desired Languages
4. Choose the following optional settings
5. Choose which products to exclude – Exclude products not licensed as it will prevent the software from being installed
6. Select which version of Office 365 you wish to install
7. Select which update channel to subscribe to for future updates
8. Select the options you wish to deploy using – Note: Display level is not relevant when deploying through Intune as Intune only performs hidden deployments
9. Choose the wrapper options you wish to use – Note I am creating a .MSI file
10. Clicking the generate button then produces a 2Mb file named OfficeProPlus.msi – Note: the size of this file is small as we chose not to include the source files. This was due to this customer having a fast internet connection and wishing to always install the latest Deferred Channel version. Also, deploying through Intune means that the source files would have to be transferred across the internet anyway resulting in the same file transfer requirements

I could now run this .msi installer on a workstation to verify the installation performs as required.

 

Deploy Office 365 using Intune

Now we have clients enrolled in our Intune tenant and a valid Office 365 installer we need to bring the two together to complete our solution. For this we will import our new .msi file as an application in Intune and then deploy to a test group to confirm functionality

1. In the Intune portal navigate to Apps – Apps – Add App, the Microsoft Intune Software Publisher will then launch in a pop-out window. Unfortunately you will need to sign in again to this application
2. Click next to begin the wizard
3. Specify the location of your custom .msi file
4. Specify the details you would like to appear for end-users. Personally I like to use the Office 365 image to give a more professional look
5. Choose the requirements as desired, in this example I am not going to specify any
6. No need to provide any command line arguments
7. Review the details entered and click Upload
8. Once the upload of the application has completed we need to deploy the application to our test system. As this is a lab I am simply going to deploy the app to all Staff but in a production environment you may want to limit this to a subset of users.
9. Navigate to Apps – Apps and select ‘Office ProPlus Installer application’ we have just created
10. Select Manage Deployment to launch the deployment wizard
11. Select the all staff collection
12. Click the Add button in the centre of the wizard and click next
13. Configure the deployment to be Required and As Soon As Possible and click finish
14. Back on our test client I can either wait for the new policy to be downloaded or force a restart to expedite the process
15. We can see the new policy downloaded in the *** log file
16. The installation will then initiate, Office 365 logs its install tasks under c:\windows\temp so we can follow the installation
17. Eventually we will then see that the office icons appear in the Start Menu on the system