Tag: Microsoft AutoUpdate

Even more changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate preferences

Kevin M. Cox April 23, 2024 No Comments

Microsoft AutoUpdate 4 MacAdmins have grown accustomed to Microsoft adding new, useful managed preferences to AutoUpdate and Office over the years.

So it comes as a surprise when widely used preferences are removed seemingly on a whim with no warning.

Recently I’ve written about two unexpected changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU):

Yesterday a member in the MacAdmins Slack spotted a new Microsoft document that contains even more changes to MAU preferences.

Read on for a little commentary plus what I think are the most noteworthy changes…

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Changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate’s Required Data Notice

Kevin M. Cox April 17, 2024 6 Comments

Version 4.70 of Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac, released this week, brought an unexpected change to the Required Data Notice dialog.

I originally wrote about how to disable this dialog back in July 2019.

• Disabling Microsoft AutoUpdate’s new Required Data Notice in managed environments

This week’s change caught many MacAdmins by surprise but thankfully the cause and solution were quickly found by collaboration in Slack.

Read on for the details and solution…

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Changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate deferral options

Kevin M. Cox February 25, 2024 1 Comment

Microsoft AutoUpdate 4 Microsoft began offering curated deferral channels for AutoUpdate a little over two years ago. These feeds allowed MacAdmins to delay updates to Office apps for a set number of days, without having to run a custom manifest server themselves.

Unfortunately these deferral channels have recently stopped working, leaving many MacAdmins scrambling to adjust.

Thankfully the community has engaged Microsoft and have pushed for a solution.

Read on for the details on why this happened and how to adjust your configuration.

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Microsoft Outlook for Mac switching to weekly releases

Kevin M. Cox March 20, 2023 1 Comment

Starting with the release of Office for Mac 2016 then continuing with 2019, 2021 and O365, Microsoft has always released updates for the core Office apps on a monthly basis.

That’s about to change, kind of…

In February, Microsoft announced (login required) that updates to Outlook for Mac would soon start releasing weekly. That change goes live tomorrow, March 21, 2023.

Read on for the details…

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Deadline timer preference added to Microsoft AutoUpdate

Kevin M. Cox July 17, 2022 1 Comment

Microsoft quietly added a new preference for AutoUpdate last month that allows MacAdmins to override the length of the default 60 minute deadline timer. The preference works starting with version 4.48 of MAU.

More details about update deadlines and this timer are available in my article Forcing Microsoft Office update deadlines with MAU from July 2019.

The new preference key is “UpdateDeadline.FinalCountDown” and is under the “com.microsoft.autoupdate2” preference domain. The data type is an integer that represents minutes.

I have already added the new preference to the ProfileManifests project that powers ProfileCreator, iMazing Profile Editor and Jamf JSON Schemas.

If you have any questions please join us in the #microsoft-autoupdate channel of the MacAdmins Slack.

Thanks to Darrin Pertschi for making me aware of this new preference.

Optimization preference added to Microsoft AutoUpdate

Kevin M. Cox February 3, 2022 1 Comment

Paul Bowden shared a new preference for Microsoft AutoUpdate last month that configures the method MAU uses to apply updates. The preference was created to work around security agents that can cause problems when updating Office on macOS.

The option is just now being highlighted despite being added to MAU 4.40 back in October 2021. Read on for the details.

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Microsoft Teams support coming to AutoUpdate in March

Kevin M. Cox January 26, 2022 3 Comments

Paul Bowden announced last week that AutoUpdate will officially begin handling Microsoft Teams with the release of MAU 4.45 on March 15, 2022.

“We’ve done a lot of analysis with various Teams builds … and we see quite a lot of segmentation because of the way the Teams built-in updater works right now, and that’s the reason why we’re switching over to MAU,” Bowden said.

“The good impact is that you’ll see a lot more consistency with your Teams versions out there. MAU will fully support not updating Teams while you’re in the middle of a conference call and all the good stuff like that.”

If you are defining an app array in your configuration profile for MAU or using MAUCacheAdmin there are a few things you’ll need to change. Read on for the details.

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Cleanup options added to MAUCacheAdmin

Kevin M. Cox January 24, 2022 3 Comments

Microsoft AutoUpdate 4 For years I have been manually cleaning up old packages on my Microsoft AutoUpdate caching server. Since I was having to manually move around collateral files for the Manifest Server component each month it wasn’t much extra work.

However now that I have switched from a custom Manifest Server to Microsoft’s official curated deferral channels, I wanted to configure my caching server to be completely hands-off.

Spurred on by a request on GitHub I decided to finally write some code to automate the cleanup process. The changes were merged into MAUCacheAdmin back on November 30. Read on for the details.

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Microsoft now provides curated deferral channels for AutoUpdate

Kevin M. Cox October 20, 2021 8 Comments

February 25, 2024: There curated deferral channels are no longer being updated. Please read: Changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate deferral options

Microsoft’s Paul Bowden announced on Tuesday at Virtual JNUC 2021 that the company is now providing additional update channels that support deferring updates for periods of time and even pausing updates on specific versions of Microsoft Office for Mac.

While these new options were announced at JNUC and Jamf Pro has native support for configuring them, MacAdmins who use a different MDM can also utilize them with custom configuration profiles right away.

I reached out to Paul for more details and clarification on these exciting new options. Read on for the details.

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MAUCacheAdmin has been updated to version 3.0

Kevin M. Cox October 13, 2021 No Comments

MAUCacheAdmin was updated to version 3.0 this afternoon to account for a change in the CDN infrastructure that serves Microsoft Office for Mac updates. As was reported in the #microsoft-autoupdate channel of the MacAdmins Slack yesterday, version 2.9 was marking every package as corrupt and re-downloading them all on each run.

From Paul Bowden’s commit notes:

In the October 2021 update, Microsoft moved to a new CDN namespace (officecdnmac.microsoft.com) which supports HTTP/2

However, the previous version of MAUCacheAdmin relied on the HTTP/1.1 ‘Content-Length’ header – which is all lowercase in HTTP/2

So:
1. Changed awk search to grep -i as it’s still possible for the new CDN to emit a HTTP/1.1 response in some cases
2. Changed main URL definitions to new namespace of officecdnmac.microsoft.com

Also fixed up a few other problems:
* Removed MAU 3.x definition
* Added 365/2021 to existing 2019 title (visual change only)
* Updated copyright year

MacAdmins who run a MAU Manifest and/or Caching server should update to the latest version of the code to prevent these looping downloads.