Technology Blog
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.comAlso 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.
Microsoft Office officially dropped support for macOS 10.12 Sierra last week with the release of the 16.31 updates. This came as no surprise to MacAdmins as the Office for Mac team announced the N-2 macOS support plan back on Sept. 4, 2018. What did come as a surprise was a new Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) alert encouraging users to upgrade to macOS Catalina.
This obviously presents a problem in managed environments where end users are not able to upgrade themselves directly though the App Store. While most admins should focus their efforts on upgrading computers to a newer version of macOS, in environments where computers must remain on Sierra or older, suppressing this dialog is desired.
Thankfully it is possible to do so with a configuration profile, read on for the details.
A last minute decision to rename Microsoft AutoUpdate’s daemon from “Microsoft AU Daemon.app” to “Microsoft Update Assistant.app” in version 4.15 caused an unexpected dialog to appear for users last week.
MacAdmins have been suppressing this standard macOS dialog for several years by pre-registering Microsoft AutoUpdate in the Launch Services database. The sudden name change caused the dialog to unexpectedly appear during the monthly update cycle of Microsoft Office in September.
Read on for details of what needs to be updated in your script to suppress this dialog for users going forward.
Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) version 4.13, released in mid-July, adds the ability to force update deadlines for Office applications. I was one of the MacAdmins who provided Microsoft developers with feedback starting last October and am happy to see the feature come to fruition.
This new functionality will definitely change how I handle updates as described in my post “A hybrid approach to managing Microsoft Office updates.”
The documentation Microsoft provided around the new feature is pretty good. But there has definitely been a lot of confusion in the MacAdmins Slack around getting it to work and there are some quirks to be aware of. If you are interested in the intricacies please read on.