Author: Jon Orton_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. Our tour of Office 365 Small Business Premium begins with a look at how you can work from nearly anywhere using familiar Office applications. You probably already know that a key benefit of Office 365 is the ability to access important documents and data even when you are out of the office. What’s new in Office 365 Small Business Premium is that you get the power of Office desktop applications as well. It’s the best of both worlds: anywhere access to your email, calendar, contacts and documents, plus the most up-to-date versions of rich and familiar applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.  Let’s take a look at how these capabilities show up in the Office 365 Preview.  Wherever you are logged in to your Preview account, you’ll notice a blue navigation header at the top of the page: The links here give you web-based access to your Outlook inbox, calendar, and contacts; your personal newsfeed; your SkyDrive Pro document storage; your internal team site, and your public web site. You’ll also notice a gear-shaped icon, which takes you to your settings page.   From this page, you can update your profile information, connect a phone or tablet to Office 365, and download software for your computer. Clicking “Install software…” takes you to the Office installation page.      From this page, you can install the latest version of Office on up to five of your PCs (for example, on your desktop machine as well as your laptop). If you are running an older version of Office, that’s not a problem. The new Office runs side by side with older versions, so you don’t need to uninstall anything to try it out. After you install Office, be sure to sign in with your Office 365 account. Once you are signed in, your Office settings and preferences will roam with you and you can store documents in the cloud. Your Office 365 Small Business Premium account gives you two places to store documents: – SkyDrive Pro: A personal storage area for documents that don’t need to be shared with everyone in your business. – Team site: A group storage area for documents that multiple people share and edit. Documents that you store in SkyDrive Pro or your team site can be accessed remotely from any computer that has a web browser and an Internet connection.  Here’s what the web page view of SkyDrive Pro looks like: If you are on a computer that does not have Office installed (for example, a library kiosk) you can  edit Office documents using a web browser with the new and improved Office Web Apps . Or, if the computer is a Windows 7 or Windows 8 PC, you can use Office on Demand to stream a full version of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to that computer in seconds. When you are done, both the application and the files you were working on are removed from the local computer. The documents that you store in SkyDrive Pro or your team site can be accessed even when you are offline. By clicking “Sync” on the upper right corner of the page shown above, you can create a folder on your PC that constantly synchronizes changes to and from your cloud storage. This way, you have local copies of all the documents, so that you can access them on your computer even when you don’t have an Internet connection. A key requirement for working on the go is the ability to stay in control of your email and calendar. Web-based access to your email, calendar, and contacts gets even better in the Office 365 Preview, with a new version of Outlook Web App that is optimized for phones and tablets.   It also is easier than ever to send instant messages and participate in meetings when you are away from your computer. Lync mobile lets you use your phone to send an IM or join a meeting with just one touch. The new Lync Web App lets you join a meeting from a web browser and enjoy multiparty HD video, instant messaging, and desktop sharing. That’s a brief summary of what’s new in anywhere access. The bottom line is that you get the flexibility to work at the office, at home or on the go; you can respond to customer questions faster; and you can act on your business wherever you are. Next time we’ll take a tour of the features in Office 365 Small Business Premium that help you work together with others .

Are you a fan of the free weekly 15 minute Office webinars? Let me ask a different question. Do you know about the free weekly 15 minute Office webinars? Doug Thomas and the Office.com Help and How To writers put these on every Tuesday from 9:15 am to 9:30 am Pacific time on Tuesdays. There’s a live Q&A session afterwards. See  Free Office webinars every Tuesday, watch videos anytime for the webinar calendar and more information. Now that you know about these weekly webinars, you’re probably wondering how you can watch videos of previous webinars, and keep up with new ones, to help you get the most out of Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, and other Office applications. The Office team just released a Windows 8 app and a Windows Phone 8 app to help you do just that! You can download both of these apps from the Windows Store. Read Windows 8 apps available for Office Webinars for more information. We’d like to hear what you think. Sign in and leave us a comment or suggestions for new webinar topics below.

The Grid is full of Office 365 experts that are brimming with great information. The  Grid User Post blog series   will expose some of The Grid’s  best content  to the entire Office 365 Community. Are you interested in contributing to The Grid?  Send JoshT_MSFT a private message  to apply. Our latest Grid User Post comes from Scott Cameron . You can read the original post here .    Traditionally, we think of  Office 365  for Exchange Online,  SharePoint Online  and Lync Online.  There’s another new (well, sort of) feature that more and more customers are interested in though –  SkyDrive  .   Microsoft  tells us that it’s for personal file storage and is integrated with Office and Windows.  It synchronizes our files and settings between computers too.  But what is SkyDrive Pro, and how *do* you use Office 365 for file storage? There are three storage “buckets” in Office 365: Exchange, SharePoint Online and SkyDrive Pro.  Here’s how much storage you get: Bucket Storage Exchange Online Mailboxes: 25 GB (plus archive on some SKUs) Public Folders: 25 GB per folder (max 100 folders) SharePoint Online Pooled 10 GB + 500 MB per user SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint Online 7 GB per user Storage Mediums in Office 365 Exchange Online Mailboxes  – let’s start with Exchange mailboxes.  They are good for storing, well, e-mail.  Your mailbox isn’t the right place for file storage.  As a matter of fact, you should minimize sending and receiving files through e-mail to maximize the amount of e-mail you can store.  There are much better places for both storing and sharing files.  Put your file in a SharePoint document library to share it with internal users or store it on SkyDrive Pro and share it via public link with external users.  In either case, you can still send an e-mail with a link to your file.  You can even subscribe to or follow a document or library to get automatic e-mail updates when files change.  More on these options in a bit… Exchange Public Folders  – where do I start?  We thought they were dead and were told we’d never see them again.  Exchange 2007 and 2010 did their best to put public folders to rest, but like a bad zombie movie they’ve come back after two point-blank shots to the head.  In  Exchange Online  you now can create up to 100 public folders, each with a 25 GB storage limit.  Theoretically that’s 2.5TB. Realistically, because it’s not possible to fill each of the mailboxes perfectly, you should be able to store around 1TB total. What are Exchange public folders good for storing?  E-mails, contacts, & calendars that you want to share mostly.  You can mail-enable them as well.  That makes them function very much like a shared mailbox.  To be honest, the GUI for managing public folders at this point is functional but isn’t what a larger organization would like.  You can use  PowerShell  to administer Public Folders and there are some more options there.  See the article  here  for more on PowerShell with Public Folders. SharePoint  – this is where Microsoft has been trying to get Public Folder users to move their data ever since Exchange 2003.  I think they were originally just trying to sell SharePoint but with it included now in Office 365, there’s no reason not to go ahead and start using it.  SharePoint is a great place to collaborate on documents.  You can store most file types in SharePoint, but there are  some limitations . One of SharePoint Online’s great new features is that you can perform light editing for many  Office files directly within your browser via the Office Web Apps regardless of whether you have the full Office Suite installed on your computer.  You can also use click-to-run to stream a full version  Office program  to your desktop – say on a borrowed computer in a hotel or anywhere you don’t have your regular PC with Office installed.  When you’re done with the application you simply close it out and don’t have to worry about licensing and leaving behind software. There are several ways to store files on SharePoint Online: Post a file to a document library Use a document set to automatically create several files from templates Synchronize a document library to your local computer and put files in the locally sync’d version Some file types can sync/import directly to SharePoint lists… Excel spreadsheets and Access databases for instance Move content in to wiki pages or lists Your Office 365 account gets 10 GB of base storage in SharePoint plus 500 MB per user account.  You can purchase additional storage at $.20 per GB per month.  At that price, storage is pretty cheap to add. In previous versions of Office 365 and SharePoint Online you had a separate My Site with your own, individual quota.  I think it was 500 MB or so.  You now will get a Personal Site, but the storage feature there has been upgraded to… SkyDrive Pro   Previously the My Site storage feature (called My Documents), SkyDrive Pro   isn’t to be confused (although many do) with consumer SkyDrive.  SkyDrive is a storage service provided by Microsoft as a spiritual successor to Windows Live Mesh and Windows Live Folders.  SkyDrive Pro also integrates the essence of functionality from SharePoint Workspace (and Live Mesh) of the past to synchronize files for offline editing. SkyDrive Pro currently allows up to 7 GB.  There is currently no way to increase this limit although rumors are that Microsoft is working on it.  I would assume a price similar to adding storage to SharePoint. You can put whatever files you like on your SkyDrive Pro.  Documents and folders in SkyDrive Pro can be shared both with internal and external users from your SharePoint Online environment.  For more on sharing from SkyDrive see  here . By the way… according to Microsoft, you can have both a personal SkyDrive and a SkyDrive Pro running side by side. The Right Tool for the Right Job With all the storage options on Office 365 there’s a solution for most situations, but don’t retire your old file server just yet.  If you have applications on-premises that require local access to shared file storage… think Autocad or a document management system that ties in to a large format printer… you’ll still want some network attached storage (NAS) or an actual file server.  You can supplement that file storage using these methods though and use a tiered storage plan.  Maybe you keep large binary files (ISOs, software install packages, etc.) on your file server, your documents on SharePoint and personal files on SkyDrive (instead of your network My Documents). You’ll want to evaluate the costs of the various storage options as well and look at what gives you the right features for the price.  Keep in mind that when storing data on Office 365 you get highly-available cloud-based storage with continuous backups and built-in disaster recovery to an alternate data center.  What you lose in the cloud is the ability to restore to a point in time (unless you are using versioning for documents) for long-term archival.  You also lose direct control of the data.  The certifications, inspections, compliance and other features in Office 365 should allay most all fears that customers have with regards to the security of their data, but for some things, cloud services still may not be the best answer. Audience: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses Office 365 for enterprises

Author: Jeremy_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. Office 365 ProPlus uses Click-to-Run installation technology which changes many aspects from installation to customization and software updating. It also means that there are entirely new processes to monitor and troubleshoot if you are the administrator installing Office for your end users, if they are having installation issues when self-installing, or if you need to contact Microsoft for any questions. As someone who has been troubleshooting Windows and application installations for many years, my immediate response to someone with a hard-to-answer question is, “Can you send me the logs?” The normal Office 365 ProPlus logs are stored in the %temp% directory in Windows and I covered the controls of how to change the logging path and file name in a previous blog in this series . This is how you define those parameters in the configuration XML used with setup:               Of course, if you need to determine what is really going on with a repeated failed install, you’ll want to both run an install with Sysinternals Process Monitor filtered to look at the integratedoffice.exe process…   Sysinternals Process Monitor capturing Click-to-Run installation processes with integratedoffice.exe Or you can enable verbose logging on your test system by writing a registry key and DWORD value prior to the installation: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftClickToRunOverRide DWORD “LogLevel” Value Data “3”   You can also use a scripted REG command to write the value with something based on this command: REG ADD “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftClickToRunOverRide ” /v LogLevel /d 3 /t REG_DWORD /f The primary log you will want to look at is the integratedoffice.exe_streamserver(..).log. It contains most of the information about the Click-to-Run installation and will enable you to see to any failed processes prior to the installer exiting. I prefer to use the Configuration Manager Trace Log Tool (cmtrace.exe) from System Center Configuration Manager 2012 to actively view logs and highlight failures easily, but you can also use other tools or notepad. Note that installation logs are stored by default in the %temp% directory.     Cmtrace.exe displaying intergratedoffice.exe_streamserver(…).log Now armed with these logs plus ProcMon outputs you can peer into the internals of how Click-to-Run setup works and more importantly if anything fails, you can see what it was. On a reassuring note, we have seen a bit higher success rates on the Click-to-Run installations versus the MSI-based packages, so you won’t be using these tools and approaches too often. And now if someone asks you for the logs from a failed Click-to-Run install you’ll be ready to provide the more detailed ones.   Jeremy Chapman @deployjeremy Office Deployment Team

Author: Jeremy_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. While the concept of having deployment automation call online file sources for unattended installations isn’t new, Office 365 ProPlus adds the unique benefit of robust file streaming instead of the traditional download and execute style installation. Office 365 ProPlus and the Office Deployment Tool (see my earlier blog about deployment options) allows you to define the https://officecdn.onmicrosoft.com file path as the SourcePath location defined in the configuration XML of the Office Deployment Tool. The current Office Deployment Tool lets you download and install Click-to-Run Office packages with your own software distribution tools. When you download Office Click-to-Run files, you will see the path where they are stored in the CMD window.     Download of the Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run files using the Office Deployment Tool In this case, Office source files are located at https://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/D85263CB-A813-4A8F-9895-E2EC9A47293 and you can use that value inside of your configuration XML. The Office Deployment Tool needs an XML with the SourcePath configured for installation which contains the OfficeDataVersionNumber folders to resolve. If you use a configuration XML with the following parameters:                                 your deployment automation will call the Office 365 streaming service and install according to the version number, architecture, language and other parameters that you assign in the configuration XML.  Notice I even used an older version number than the current one (.1019)  and was able to declare update behavior, display level and accept the EULA on behalf of my users. In a nutshell, even though I am using Office 365 as the SourcePath to install from, I didn’t give up any controls I had by installing Office 365 ProPlus from my local file share location. If I had Group Policy settings enforced on the computers I target for my deployment, then I would have complete control over how Office is installed, configured and managed. This is where it can get interesting… If I use the Office Deployment Tool – specifically just the setup.exe and the configuration XML sample I have above – I can pair this with System Center Configuration Manager 2012, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, Windows Intune, third party tools, simple logon scripts or even psexec commands. In this case, I decided to pair with another cloud service – Windows Intune – to show everything working.     Process for using Windows Intune to stream an Office 365 ProPlus installation – 1. Configure install, 2. Push install instructions to PC, 3. Stream from Office 365, 4. Report success back to Windows Intune You might be asking yourself, “Why would I use Windows Intune versus sending users to the Office 365 Web portal to self-install Office?” If you are asking this question, there is a good chance you are an administrator on your computer or your users are able to install software themselves. For more than a decade, Microsoft has advocated Standard User accounts in Windows to maintain configuration control and therefore improve inherent security levels against malware. If you also manage a lot of software, it wouldn’t make sense to ask users to visit multiple websites to install their own software. Imagine your first day on the job and your boss tells you, “Here is your computer and email account. I sent you an email with a list of the 100 applications you’ll need to be productive and all the links of where to find the applications. Enjoy the next 3-8 hours of software installation.” What initially sounds like freedom for the end user would be a degraded experience for the person who otherwise receives a pre-configured PC with the 100 applications pre-installed based on his user role, geography and language preferences (you could argue that is the primary reason why Windows imaging and deployment automation exists). Centralizing your application resources to a single catalog and location along with using “required” or “push” installation performed by the administrator simplifies the process for the user and helps ensure that your users’ PCs stay in a manageable state. Windows Intune and System Center Configuration Manager 2012 both provide a central application catalog and support push software deployments. I put together a short narrated video of the process using Windows Intune along with Office 365 streaming. Basically, I used a file similar to the configuration XML sample above (I named it configuration2.xml) and added that along with the setup.exe to my Windows Intune environment. These two files only constitute about half a megabyte (MB) of space, so it doesn’t really consume any storage resources. It also means that the files are quickly copied from the Windows Intune service to the managed PC’s local cache. Both Windows Intune and the application model in System Center Configuration Manager 2012 will download the entire application payload prior to executing installation commands. For Office 365 ProPlus, that would mean you would typically need to wait for a 1 gigabyte (GB) file download, then Office would be installed from the local Windows Intune or Configuration Manager file cache. In this case, we can just cache that tiny half MB file and the streaming begins immediately from Office 365 according to our instruction set. The result is that the Windows Intune service basically instructs the Office 365 service and when completed sends a success message back to Windows Intune. Here it is in action… (Please visit the site to view this video)   Jeremy Chapman @deployjeremy Office Deployment Team

The sign-in page for Office 365 has a new look! The redesign provides a simple sign in experience that adapts to work better on whatever device you’re using, from a desktop to tablet to phone, as well as reducing the number of times you’ll need to sign in. Highlights include: The sign-in page automatically adapts to the screen resolution and capabilities of different devices, operating systems, and browsers. You can start signing in almost immediately, while the rest of page downloads in the background. Improved experience for on-premises-to-cloud single sign-on. You can stay connected until you want to sign out. Just check the “Keep me signed in” option. Want to know more? Check out details and screenshots of the new experience . NOTE: The new sign-in page works best in Internet Explorer 8 or later browsers. Learn more about Office 365 browser support .

In this week’s new Office Garage series episode, our hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh explore the change in guard of compatibility tools; race Click-to-Run Office installs using MDT, SCCM, and Windows Intune versus the MSI and catch up with Office engineer, John Hoegger, on the end-to-end aspects of deployment. They demonstrate compatibility tools and automated software distribution and discuss the Office roll-out inside Microsoft, to answer whether or not deployment just got faster. Tune into www.microsoft.com/garage .

Author: Jeremy_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. Welcome to my series on Office 365 ProPlus for the administrator. Some of you will have used various components of Office 365 and in some cases be able to skip past large sections of this blog series and others may be new to the concepts in Office 365 ProPlus and will want to know how it might impact their current software distribution, Windows imaging or software management processes. I have a long history in Windows imaging and deployment and prior to that worked heavily with systems management products to deliver and manage software, and I think that will come out as I write about all of the IT pro features for Office 365 ProPlus and related topics. I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the best software engineers, testers and program managers over the last couple of years and we are excited to present and deliver a lot of new IT value related to Office deployment and management technologies. This blog series builds on the Office and the Cloud blog authored today by John Jendrezak and will go into a lot of depth in subsequent posts. I posted this series in reverse order should it should read from top to bottom like one contiguous long blog, but I do plan to address further topics and do some hands-on integration in the future with management tools we can use to automate Office 365 ProPlus deployment, like System Center Configuration Manager, Windows Intune and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. What is new with Office 365 ProPlus and why should I care as an IT pro? Office 365 ProPlus builds on the culmination of several technologies – from application streaming to cloud services – to enable new user and administrative experiences to support Office as a Service. Unlike previous iterations of Office application suites, Office 365 ProPlus enables users to get to rich Office experiences quickly on any Windows 7 or newer PC and have their files and personalized settings follow them from PC to PC. Whether at home, at work or on the go, Office is now connected by the person using Office, not by the device – that means each user can install Office on all the computers they own or use. The Office 365 ProPlus installation does not require you to uninstall or upgrade from previous Office versions, instead it streams Office down to you PC alongside your existing Office applications. Streaming enables you to start using Office in a fraction of the time needed for older generation Office installations – you can use Office while it continues to stream in the background. Once Office 365 ProPlus is launched, you sign in to Office and it automatically links you to your files, settings, personalization and even will point you to the last position you were reading in a document, regardless of the computer you are using. Because your Office is accessible anywhere, you can work across computers and Windows devices seamlessly – however you want. When combined with SkyDrive Pro, Office 365 ProPlus also lets you use Office anywhere with Office on Demand, a new way to quickly deliver rich Office applications to a PC within seconds using application streaming technology. Office on Demand streams and launches a temporary copy of your favorite Office application without installing it and when you log off, there are no links back into the new Office applications and the files you were working on are no longer on that PC, but saved back into SkyDrive Pro by default. This will work on any Windows 7 or newer computer, whether you have an Administrator or Standard User account. As you would expect, these new Office experiences can be delivered and managed on your organization’s terms. Office 365 ProPlus is designed to be suitable for small businesses to multinational corporations. IT administrators can control active users, software configurations and delivery, data access and connections to email and communication services. As you read on I will try to cover all of the areas that matter to IT and system administrators and also cover the major processes for assessing, testing, piloting, deploying and managing Office 365 ProPlus. I’m posting most of the major desktop application-related topics as one block of content, but intend to keep going. The next planned phase in the series is to show working integrated scenarios I’ve built with tools like System Center Configuration Manager 2012, Windows Intune and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. For now, these blogs are intended to show the architecture and core plumbing to enable deployment and management for organizations of all sizes. Feel free to submit content requests and give us your feedback.   Jeremy Chapman @deployjeremy Office Deployment Team  

Author: Jeremy_MSFT Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog. Office 365 ProPlus integrates with your IT service management processes and tools. With Office 365 ProPlus you and your users receive unparalleled access and experiences with Office programs. Office 365 ProPlus uses the cloud for streamlined software delivery and updates, but does not execute Office applications remotely in cloud, instead the focus is getting Office up and running quickly on the local PC using application streaming. These new experiences enable offline use and can take full advantage of local system resources, without being limited by what can be done via the Web browser or remote desktop experiences. Office 365 ProPlus is connected to the user – not the device – and that means integration starts with provisioning your users an active Office 365 account. The resulting Microsoft Online Services ID gives users access to the software and services you allow them to have and it also acts as the way Office delivers roaming settings across a user’s collection of devices. There are multiple options for establishing online IDs – from manual or bulk list entries to Active Directory synchronization to directory services federation. These options allow you to tailor the login and provisioning experience to either reflect real time changes to your directory services to manage all identity and authentication aspects in the cloud. Office 365 ProPlus also integrates with existing software distribution policies and practices in your organization. Some organizations will allow users to perform Office 365 ProPlus installation directly from the Office 365 Web portal, but most will opt to download and import Office 365 ProPlus installation files into their software distribution environments, then use those tools to centrally perform installation on behalf of their users. This integration with on premises software distribution allows organizations to maintain existing security policies where users do not typically have required rights to install software themselves. Office 365 ProPlus is also designed to integrate with Microsoft Application Virtualization to provide additional configuration and control options. Additionally, those using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) can use Office 365 ProPlus on user-dedicated Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer virtual machines without the Remote Desktop Services role enabled.     Using Software Distribution to Deploy Office 365 ProPlus Office 365 ProPlus is designed to integrate with most common desktop architectures while providing additional cloud benefits for quickly provisioning and de-provisioning users, roam core productivity settings across devices and incorporate common user credentials to activate Office experiences across multiple computing devices. For more information on integrating Office 365 ProPlus into your organization, check out Deployment options for Office 365 ProPlus Preview on TechNet.

It’s been a while since I have blogged in the Office 365 Technical Blog and if you haven’t had a chance, check out our TV-like series of client video blogs at www.microsoft.com/garage.  In this post, I want to answer a few questions we are getting frequently pertaining to the Office 365 client apps… 1. How do I upgrade Office 365 ProPlus Preview clients to release versions? 2. If my Office 365 tenant hasn’t been upgraded, how do I get the new Office clients for PCs and Macs? Let’s start with the first question. A lot of people think the Office 365 ProPlus apps are radically different compared to their MSI-based brethren, but once installed they are practically indiscernible. Likewise, as almost every Beta release of software from Office to Windows and others, there isn’t usually a direct “upgrade” path from a Beta (or “Preview”) release to a production build. Usually this is because it isn’t a mainstream supported or tested path. In the same sense, upgrading from a 4128 Preview branch build to what was a 4454 Release branch build does not work. This scenario requires uninstalling and reinstalling Office clients. We would recommend the same for Click-to-Run packages or MSI-based installation packages. In fact, even when you go from Office 2007 to Office 2010 or Office 2010 to Office 2013, the recommended approach in an IT-managed environment is to do an uninstall and reinstall of the Office client applications. This practice will lead to higher installation success rates and user configuration settings are maintained, so you end up with an “upgrade-like” outcome. Like with Office MSI-based packages, there are offscrub scripts available for Click-to-Run packages if uninstallation does not complete as planned. I will walk through the uninstall and reinstall steps in this post and also talk about the way you would script this using the Office Deployment Tool with your application deployment tools. The first thing we need to check is which build of Office is installed. There have been three primary build numbers for Office 365 ProPlus Preview: 15.0.4128.1014, x.1019, x.1025. I tend to refer to these as “4128 builds.” To identify the build you are on, you go to %ProgramFiles%Microsoft Office 15v32.cab and open VersionDescriptor.xml. If you don’t see this file or folder structure, chances are you have Office Professional Plus 2013 Preview (MSI package) installed. If you do have and open the XML, you should see something like this: You can also go to the backstage of any of your Office apps – like Word – by clicking the File tab, then Account and you will see the version number: I highlighted the XML above compared to the somewhat friendlier user interface because it contains a detail that determines when updates are possible, notice this line: That is similar to the cversion.ini in Windows we all know and love and like cversion.ini’s MinClient property it gates updates only as far back as the 4446 build branch. If you are an avid Office enthusiast, you may be asking yourself, “But Jeremy, that build number is quite a bit higher than the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build of Office Professional Plus or Standard 2013 (MSI). Those were 15.0.4420.1017, so shouldn’t we be using a 15.0.4420.1017 build of Office 365 ProPlus?” Truth is with Click-to-Run and Office 365 ProPlus (plus every other non volume SKU) monthly updates will see new build numbers for each and every build. Our General Availability (GA) build branch on February 27th for Office 365 ProPlus was 4454 and now we are at 4481… and counting. Because your Office 365 ProPlus Preview is 15.0.4128.1025 (usually), it is lower than the “RequiredClientVersion Build” property value and therefore cannot be “updated” to a 4481 build. But why exactly? The Preview builds use a different and parallel activation service with Preview tenants and accounts, the virtual file system plumbing for Click-to-Run is also quite a bit different, and as mentioned before Preview/Beta-to-RTM isn’t a mainstream scenario as an upgrade path. So as with pre-release Office versions in the past, an uninstall and reinstall is required and recommended. Let’s walk through that now. Uninstalling Office 365 ProPlus Preview There are really three ways to uninstall the Office 365 ProPlus Preview clients; manual uninstall, removal via the Office Deployment Tool or stronger removal via Offscrub support tools. In most cases, simple uninstall via the Windows Control Panel will suffice. Going to “Control PanelProgramsPrograms and Features” manually in Windows will display Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus (and even the build number again): If you have a few installs out there and need to automate the uninstallation of Office, you should download the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run Preview . If you search the Microsoft Download Center for the “Office Deployment Tool” (ODT), you will see a Preview and a release version. Rule of thumb is if you are installing/uninstalling the Preview client, use the Preview ODT. You will need to download the setup.exe and the configuration XML file. To uninstall Office 365 ProPlus Preview, use the Remove property in the XML. You will ultimately run: setup.exe /configure path_toconfiguration.xml Here is an example of the XML file – I called mine remove.xml: The Display Level=”None” property will make it a silent uninstall and if you thought the Click-to-Run installation was fast, the uninstallation is much faster. Finally, there is a nuclear option to completely remove Office Click-to-Run packages using the Microsoft Fix It tool found in KB2739501 . This tool is great if you experience any uninstallation issues, but the manual or ODT-driven uninstalls will typically be enough. Between those three options, you should have no problems uninstalling Office 365 ProPlus Preview. Installing Office 365 ProPlus Release Build… and the answer to “If my Office 365 tenant hasn’t been upgraded, how do I get the new Office clients for PCs and Macs?” Now that you are familiar with the Office Deployment Tool, it’s time to use it to install Office. This is also how to get Office if you currently have a Pre-Update Office 365 tenant with rights to Office Professional Plus. You are using a pre-upgrade tenant if your site still has the orange flourishes around the top of the portal page. IMPORTANT NOTE: Use the Office Deployment Tool release version – not the one with “Preview” in it’s title. Now on the same machine you just uninstalled Office 365 ProPlus Preview, we will install Office 365 ProPlus’ latest build (which is now 15.0.4481.1005) using the release version of the ODT. To do this, you need to make small changes to the sample configuration.xml file. You can remove the SourcePath if you want to install straight from the Internet. Here is what my configuration.xml file looks like: Then from the folder where I extracted the Office Deployment Tool, I run the following command from an Administrator Command Prompt: Of course there are many, many more options to use with the configuration.xml file and everything is described in painstaking details on TechNet. Now all you have to do is sign in with your active Office 365 tenant credentials – and those can be a pre-upgrade tenant with Office Professional Plus rights, an M, E3, E4 or Office 365 ProPlus standalone new tenant. But there is still one more thing I want to cover… How Do I Get Office for Mac 2011 with a Pre-Upgrade Tenant? Pre-upgrade Office 365 tenants will not expose links to end users for Office 365 ProPlus or Office for Mac 2011. If you want to use Office for Mac 2011 with Office 365 activation, you can download the DMG installation package from this link . That will download an English-US version of Office for Mac 2011 SP3 which will activate against an Office 365 tenant Pre- or Post-Upgrade for users with rights to Office Professional Plus or Office 365 ProPlus desktop apps. These will also count against the five installations per user and the interface to manage deactivation of Office apps will be available to users once pre-upgrade tenants have been upgraded.   Thanks and that’s a
ll for now. Be sure to tune in to our Garage Series Live! webcast on April 3rd 9AM PST at www.microsoft.com/garage .   See you then, Jeremy Chapman Office Deployment Team