PowerShellr: December 2014

We ran into an Issue where users office installs wouldn't activate and the users were unable to sign into portal.office.com. When we looked at the tickets, we noticed all the users had Apostrophies in their last name....

Many People have Special characters, like apostrophes, in their email addresses. Names like O'Neil are common and if your organization uses first.last as primary smtp, You have a problem.While an email address like Paul.O'Neil@contoso.com is perfectly valid in an On Premise exchange environment, Office 365 hates the apostrophe, and as a result, the user can't login. Whats worse is that Office itself wont activate, and puts the user into trial mode - awesome end user experience.

Remember Microsoft Says Primary email must match the Users UserPrincipleName Attribute, the simplest solution is to add a New Primary SMTP address without the apostrophe (Paul.ONeil@contoso.com) , and make the current apostroph'd (Paul.O'Neil@contoso.com) address a secondary.Remove the apostrophe from the UserPrincipleName, trigger a resynch with office 365 and you should be good.

Office 365 Changes everything you know about Enterprise deployments of applications. The first thing is that Office is licensed per user and will need to authenticate with microsoft. The second
is that the office application itself is actually a self Contained APP-V package - so installation requires the use of a Office Deployment tool to perform local enterprise deployments.

Unfortunately, this tool is unlike any other previous office deployment tool.

Tracking Per user Licensing.

There are 3 methods for tracking licensing. First we can have separate Microsoft online accounts. these work similarly to how a users personal Hotmail account works. Users get a <user>@corp.onmicorsoft.com address and authenticate using that. These exist solely in Microsoft's environment, and users need to sign into office the first time they use it.

the Second option is to use Microsoft's Dir Synch tool to Copy your active directory to their directory. This automates things, but as the users domain account and Microsoft online account are different, they must still login to office.

The third and Final option is to use ADFS to federate your active directory with MS. In this case, Microsoft online refers authentication back to your active directory via AD FS, and this allows office users to get single signon, so they are not prompted to sign into office on first use.

Installing Using the Click to Run Tool.

The Office deployment kit includes the clicktorun tool. You can download the Office deployment kit at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30344
The Click to run tool gets passed an XML file that tells it how to configure the Install. The XML File allows you to specify what Products and Languages to install (Or exclude) Below is an example Config.xml . Microsoft offers a reference document as well.

 <Configuration>  
   <Add SourcePath="\\mg145.contoso.com\pkgsource\Microsoft\Office365\Office\" version="15.0.4641.1003" OfficeClientEdition="32">  
   <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">  
    <Language ID="en-us" />  
    <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />  
    <ExcludeApp ID="InfoPath" />  
    <ExcludeApp ID="Project" />  
    <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />  
    <ExcludeApp ID="SharePointDesigner" />  
    <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />  
   </Product>  
  </Add>   
  <Display Level="full" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />   
 </Configuration>

Once you have the Config file created, You need to download the office install to the share you created. the command setup.exe /download <path of Configuration.xml file> will do this.

Actually installing office requires you to call >setup.exe /configure <path of Click-to-Run Configuration.xml file>

Microsoft offers documentation on the Click to Run tool At http://technet.microsoft.com/en-nz/library/jj219422.aspx

Adding Components.

In our above example you will notice we excluded Publisher. We can re-add publisher by calling a separate XML file and choosing the additional product to install. Compare the XML Below to the ProPlus one above.

 <Configuration>  
   <Add SourcePath="\\mg145.contoso.com\pkgsource\Microsoft\Office365\Office\" version="15.0.4641.1003" OfficeClientEdition="32">  
   <Product ID="PublisherRetail">  
    <Language ID="en-us" />   
   </Product>  
  </Add>   
  <Display Level="full" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />   
 </Configuration>

At Present you can use the Following Product codes:

AccessRetail
ExcelRetail
GrooveRetail
InfoPathRetail
LyncEntryRetail
LyncRetail
OneNoteRetail
OutlookRetail
PowerPointRetail
PublisherRetail
SPDRetail (SharePoint Designer)
WordRetail

Some Office 365 Subscriptions also Include Visio and/or Project

VisioProRetail
ProjectProRetail
VisioStdRetail
ProjectStdRetail

to Install the component call >setup.exe /configure <path of specific Click-to-Run Configuration.xml file>

Uninstalling Office

You can remove everything by calling setup and specifying the following config:

 <Configuration>  
    <Remove All="True" />  
 </Configuration>

You can also remove individual packages by specifying a product id. All the product ID's listed above are also valid here.

<Remove>
    <Product ID="PublisherRetail" />
</Remove>

Shared Computers

Shared Computer Activation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782860.aspx

Repairing Office.

there are 2 modes for repairing office. the first is online mode and downloads the entire product and installs it. This is bad, because it completely ignores any customizations you may have done.

A quick repair will refresh the install. This will not add adtional prodcuts thet were previously turned off.

Both repairs can be done from Programs and Features, Select office, Click Change, and you will be prompted to choose.

It is also possible to issue the commands locally on a system. This is handy if you need to automate a change. For example, If you install office 2013 while 2010 is still on the system, File associations will break if you remove office 2010. to repair them, you will need to run a quick repair. For example - to do a Online repair you can issue the following:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64\OfficeClickToRun.exe" scenario=Repair platform=x86 culture=en-us RepairType=FullRepair DisplayLevel=False

Note that the Clicktoruntool path changes based on weather the os is 32 or 64bit.
for 64-bit operating systems:
“C:\program files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64"
for 32-bit operating systems:
“C:\program files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX86"

A full reference is available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219426.aspx

PowerShellr

Monday, December 22, 2014

Firewall Configuration for Office 365

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

MS Office 365 - Office Suite Installation

Setup, Packaging and Deployment

Troubleshooting and Issues:

Office 365 - office fails to activate, and users cant sign in

Monday, December 1, 2014

Office 365 - Office 2013 Click to Run Enterprise Deployment.