I'm writing this post to catalog problems I recently faced while doing Windows Autopilot installations, we use a very slim enrollment Status Page (ESP) configuration with only one app marked as required (Microsoft Edge Chromium). The remaining applications are a mix of Win32 apps and the all important Microsoft Office 365 suite. This suite was configured with the following apps.
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This worked well since about mid-February 2020. However, starting week 46, I started noticing the following error on newly delivered HP computers with Windows 10 version 1909 (and some office components preinstalled) after clicking the Microsoft Outlook icon soon after Windows Autopilot had completed.
Choose Yes or No had pretty much the same effect, Outlook was well and truly broken. If you clicked on the Account Information in Outlook you'd see something like this. A Metered connection warning followed by a Upgrade in Progress warning.
The interesting thing to note is that Computers that had a clean image of Windows 10 version 1909 with no Office installed previously did not exhibit this problem, it only affected factory image(s) of HP computers with Windows 10 version 1909 factory image and those images come with a version of Microsoft Office installed (in the Nordics), namely Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus version 1908 (Build 11929.20394).
Based on the above I knew that clean installs of Windows 10 1909 did not have the issue (even though they subsequently got the Office 2011 version installed before the user logged on). I initially suspected that security software or a device configuration profile were to blame, and went through the time consuming task of excluding a computer from each profile, and then resetting it to verify the behavior.
Armed with that knowledge I recreated the Office Suite settings in my own test tenant, and ran a Windows Autopilot build, to my surprise the HP failed starting outlook the exact same way as in Production, so that completely ruled out everything other than the version of Office installed on the HP.
The breakthrough came when looking at the settings of the Office suite in Endpoint Manager. The version of Office that gets installed is based on your settings in the Office Suite, and we had been using these settings without problem since February 2020. The really important bit was the update channel, shown below.
You should deploy Current Channel (Preview) to a small, representative sample of users in your organization. This can help you identify any possible issues for your organization before those new features are released more broadly to your users that have Current Channel.
We also encourage you to use Current Channel (Preview) so that you can identify any possible issues that you want us to fix before that version is released to Current Channel. This can help reduce the number of non-security updates that are needed for Current Channel.
I decided to change the Update Channel from Current Channel (Preview) to Current Channel. This decision was based on the fact that the Preview channel may contain changes that are incompatible with our image in some way, which is odd because we are using the factory installed HP image.
Once I made the change, and re-tested Windows Autopilot the difference was clear. Now Outlook worked as expected without issue (and Word/Excel issues disappeared also), however the version of Office installed was Version 2010 instead of Version 2011 that we got in the Current Channel (Preview). This didn't matter too much but of course it meant that some cool new cloud friendly features in Version 2011 were now no longer available on newly installed Windows Autopilot machines.
The versioning used by Microsoft for Office is somewhat confusing, in the Office Account screen you'll see the version info, here you can see it's listed as Current Channel, Version 2010 (the version without the problem).
Note: we've noticed that HP's corporate ready image includes an office version that is released before the OS version was released, so for example if you get Windows 10 version 1909, then you'll get the Office version released approximately one month before that (Office version 1908). Likewise if you got Windows 10 version 2004, you should get Office version 2003.
Sometimes living on the edge means you will fall over. I know that changing from Current Channel (Preview) to Current Channel might only delay the problem until the Current Channel update channel migrates to the new version of office next month, so we may actually encounter this problem again, and soon.
So to conclude, if any of you have come across this exact issue (I have searched and found similar problems with "Library not registered", but the advice within them didn't apply here), then please get in touch with me. In the meantime I will look through the gathered ETL traces to see if they provide any clue as to why Office was so broken on these new devices in order to root-cause the problem.
Just found this post as we have randomly hit this issue on HP devices but specifically the G7 variety - we have many G6 devices in place and they are fine. I checked the update channel and we are current channel but we found the issue on machines that had Visio installed strangely only. I am also digging and if find anything will post on here
I had to move away from the native intune package as when it failed was never any useful information as to why or how in logs. Using PSappdeploy also gives feedback on progress and additional logging using the xml creator in Apps Admin Center (office.com)
Just to add to our troubleshooting I learned something new today in that when Office is removed completely from a device the Outlook profile still hangs about. We were re-installing and it wasnt fixing for the user. I had to manually go in and purge some Outlook folders in local/roaming %appdata%
We also noticed that the broken profile created a .pst in the documents folder - as we had OneDrive configured in Known Folder Move it was constantly trying to replicate changes and it cant. Part of reasons .pst files arent supported within OneDrive
interesting, it also seems that Microsoft is recommending the Monthly Enterprise Channel for office (while at the same time recommending Current Channel, see above...), which of course solves the problem but lacks features,
Yeh whilst an option i just decided to go the destroy way so we have packages to remove all the unneeded software and as mentioned above modified the office install to attempt to remove office whilst also supressing error codes. PSAPPDEPLOY code is
Sure so we use a wrapper called psappdeploy which for intune is invaluable (intune logs are really painful to go through) PSAppDeployToolkit. It has some additional functions so all we have for installing office is below lines:
Have to make sure you ignoreexitcodes for removal as for example base windows ISO from Microsoft wouldnt have it in place - and without ignoring error codes it would just fail before trying to install office.
I have recently had this issue come up with a recent update to 21H2, and I am loosing activation on 2016 office suites as well as O365 pro plus. We had over 8700 workstations upgraded and we have had around 200 or so cases of this issue post 21h2 update. We did have some cases before the 21H2 update, but this update definitely brought the issue to the forefront.
In conjunction with the Registry permissions addition mentioned previously in the thread you need to activate office via via a canned MS vbs script from the command line. Once both were done the 2016 Office suite that was having problems is now functioning without errors and no longer getting the warning about not being able to validate your product, please run a repair.
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