Tag: Microsoft Office

Privacy and Consent changes in Microsoft Office 16.28

Kevin M. Cox August 15, 2019 3 Comments

Microsoft Office 16.28, released Tuesday, includes a new privacy dialog for users and a number of changes to the preferences that control privacy and telemetry settings. This new dialog cannot be directly suppressed for Office 365 users, but can for those with a 2019 Volume License.

Microsoft has provided documentation, Use preferences to manage privacy controls for Office for Mac, of these new preferences and Paul Bowden provided a Keynote slide deck, Privacy and Consent Controls (PDF version), from a set of video conferences he hosted last week. (Unfortunately video recordings of the calls are not available.)

Thanks to the hard work of the Office for Mac team most of these preferences can be managed via configuration profiles. Read on for an overview of the changes and items of note.

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Forcing Microsoft Office update deadlines with MAU

Kevin M. Cox July 30, 2019 2 Comments

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.

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

Kevin M. Cox July 19, 2019 3 Comments

Version 4.13 of Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac, released on Tuesday, contains a new Required Data Notice that will pop up immediately upon installation and must be acknowledged before MAU will continue to function.

While the user experience is not great, thankfully Microsoft has provided us a way to suppress the new dialog on managed systems. Read on for the details.

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Microsoft Teams notifications from MAU Caching Server

Kevin M. Cox June 28, 2019 1 Comment

Back in February I wrote about Automating MAU Caching Server with Slack Notifications and it has been working great. Earlier this week a request was made on Github to add support for sending notifications to Microsoft Teams.

We don’t use Teams here at work but a quick search showed it supports messages via an incoming webhook, just like Slack, so I decided it give it a try. It didn’t take long to adjust the code and after realizing I could create a Teams workspace for free I got it tested in short order.

Paul Bowden merged my pull request so if you’d like to take advantage just grab version 2.6 of the MAUCacheAdmin script. If you are interested in the details read on.

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Automating MAU Caching Server with Slack Notifications

Kevin M. Cox February 20, 2019 No Comments

Slack In the past I have always run MAUCacheAdmin manually. Microsoft Office updates are usually only released once per month so it is easy to know when another run is needed. Plus with no built-in way to move collateral files into the appropriate place automated downloads won’t automatically make updates available for clients.

However with more and more applications becoming Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) aware, and out-of-bound patches being released, I decided it was time to automate the checks and downloads to my MAU Caching Server. This is easy enough to accomplish with a LaunchDaemon but I still needed a way to be notified when MAUCacheAdmin found updated packages to download so that I could move the collateral files into place.

I decided to see if I could add Slack notifications and when I began to dig in was pleasantly surprised to see that Microsoft’s Paul Bowden had already coded HipChat notifications. Using that as a base it turned out to be much simpler than I expected to get it working with Slack. Read on for the details.

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Customizing Microsoft Office versions served by an MAU Caching Server

Kevin M. Cox February 17, 2019 No Comments

I have been running a Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) Caching Server for a couple years now and have always allowed it to download and serve everything, even applications we don’t use. My thinking was that I’d rather have something and not need it, than need it and not have it.

This has never been an issue for older products like Office 2011 and Lync (or even current products like Company Portal and Skype for Business) because combined they are only around 500 MB. The fact that Office 2011 and Lync are no longer receiving updates means the bits on disk haven’t changed in over a year and don’t need to be downloaded with each run of MAUCacheAdmin.

However things changed with the release of Office 2019 last fall. While Office 2011 is no longer being maintained, Office 2016 will continue receiving security updates until October 2020. If you have already transitioned to Office 2019 this means that MAUCacheAdmin will continue to download almost 6 GB of installers and updaters every month that you don’t need.

Thankfully it is easy to customize this behavior so read on if you’d like the details.

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A hybrid approach to managing Microsoft Office updates

Kevin M. Cox February 6, 2018 No Comments

Most MacAdmins take an either/or approach to managing updates for Microsoft Office on macOS, utilizing either Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) or Munki. However I’ve found that a hybrid approach using both works best for us.

I’ve shared my setup severals times on the MacAdmins Slack, most recently in a direct message, so I wanted to provide more details here. Read on if you are interested in how I’m keeping Office up-to-date and providing for new installs.

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Microsoft AutoUpdate Caching Server Options & Behavior

Kevin M. Cox April 26, 2017 No Comments

I’ve been using an internal Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) Caching Server here at the newspaper since shortly after it was announced by Paul Bowden last year. I helped explain the various configuration options available last night in the #microsoft-office channel of the MacAdmins Slack and wanted to expand on them with a more detailed article.

There are three different ways the MAU Caching Server can be configured. If you are interested in learning the differences of those options please read on.

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