Oct 05 2016 11:25 AM - edited Mar 28 2017 07:17 AM
Last week at Microsoft Ignite the Office 365 ProPlus deployment team released a brand new guide focused on making your organization's Office 365 ProPlus deployment a success.
This guide has been created by a team of subject matter experts from the Office 365 Product Group, Office 365 Product Marketing Group, and delivery experts from Microsoft Services which provides a single source for the Office 365 ProPlus deployment guidance that you need to successfully deploy and manage Office 365 ProPlus, including recommended guidance for discovery of applications, preferred deployment scenarios and practices, recommended approaches for channel management, and reporting capabilities for licensing and usage.
Get the guidance you need from a single comprehensive source,
Oct 06 2016 12:42 AM
Great looking resource. For anyone that's wondering, it's a OneNote package and once imported looks like this:
Oct 06 2016 03:42 PM
SolutionThis is fantastic.
The deployment 'how to' technet articles were functional, but a best practice guide is just what we needed.
Thank you!!
Oct 08 2016 01:30 AM
One piece of feedback: the notebook mentions usingt the OffScrub script for removal of previous versions, but the page on OffScrub doesn't tell you where to get it or how to use it.
Searching for it I keep finding a tech net blog dated 2011, but it doesn't mention Office 2013: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/odsupport/2011/04/08/how-to-obtain-and-use-offscrub-to-automate-...
Where do we get OffScrub for Office 2013?
Daniel's personal blog is the only place I've found for info on OffScrub for removing Office 2016, which is sometimes necessary if a deployment partially fails:http://www.danielclasson.com/how-to-retrieve-the-offscrub-script-for-removing-office-2016office-365-...
-Sonia
Oct 09 2016 06:39 PM
Thank you Sonia, we will look into getting this updated in the guide.
Oct 09 2016 07:29 PM
Thanks Chris. Drop me a reply here when it's done please, if you get a chance.
-Sonia
Oct 10 2016 09:30 AM
OffScrub is supported by Premier and should be contacted in order to obtain the latest version for your specific Office deployment.
Oct 10 2016 09:39 AM
Hi Sonia, Thank you for the feedback, I have added this to the next update of the site and content.
In the mean time, you can find the latest version of OffScrub by contacting Premier as Ryan mentioned, or you can go to the GitHub site and download the tool
Oct 10 2016 07:12 PM
Thanks Brian! Extremely useful to have it on GitHub.
-Sonia
Nov 21 2016 01:32 PM
Nice to see a rich OneNote document instead of the usual .pptx!
Dec 01 2016 03:25 PM
If you have to write a massive document like this about deploying a single software package, you've designed a really inefficient deployment system.
The team that built this deployment system needs to know they maybe didn't do a great job.
The only thing that's made this process less painful is the GitHub-hosted configuration editor. I believe that was originally developed by a 3rd party. http://officedev.github.io/Office-IT-Pro-Deployment-Scripts/XmlEditor.html
Yes, it's true. I'm not happy about how much complexity this brings to my job. Yet another overly-complicated system to learn.
Dec 01 2016 03:59 PM
The deployment itself is not that hard. The deployment tool is an executable with two switches and a configuration file. The configuration file has documentation that explains each section.
I was actually surprised to see the GitHub tool appear. Yes, it's handy for sure. But editing the .xml file is easier than learning powershell commands.
The challenge is applying this tool to multiple different real world scenarios. Your existing enviroment differs to mine, so the guide helps you make some decisions about who's getting updates when, how you are going to run the setup.exe etc. As for any application, so will do with SCCM, some with use Group Policy some may use a third party software deployment tool.
There's also the change in the servicing model for updates. Again, it's not hard, it's just different to how we've rolled out Office updates before.
-Sonia
Dec 02 2016 09:02 AM
Hi Sonia,
(I ended up writing a lot more than I expected so if you're a busy person please feel free not to read. :) Most of my words are actually not directed at you but the anyone in the Office team that has influence.)
Everything is not hard once you understand it. Everyone has different skills and different amounts of time to research, think on a topic, and test. My time for research and experimentation are very limited.
The first time I read over the documentation and consulted with my co-worker on it, we still had a lot of questions. And I've never gotten deployments to work from an SMB share, let alone do I have time to update that share with new versions. (Microsoft releases WAY too many updates across all their products. It's impossible to keep up.)
The GitHub tool appeared because there is a need for it. This guide even includes a link to the tool. This means Microsoft sees the value in it and recognizes there is a hole to be filled.
> The challenge is applying this tool to multiple different real world scenarios.
That's because the deployment system they've come up with is overly-complicated and not thought through well. It wasn't designed with the end-user in mind. An engineering team, or single individual, were tasked with coming up with a way to deploy this. They developed it in their bubble at Microsoft and then released it. Now, what, two or three years later, they're releasing a massive guide, on top of all their other documentation, to make up for the complexity.
With usability problems, you don't blame the user. That's not how you fix usability issues and more training is also not the answer (quite the opposite).
Here's an example for you of a team in Microsoft that made a lot of changes to their deployment methodology based on community feedback and observation. When the Server team announced Nano server, and released the first public previews, their original plan was to be as minimalist as possible: zero UI with an esoteric deployment method. I think they had it in their minds that it wouldn't be too hard. I mean, it was easy to them, right?
What happened? People complained, they asked for more assistance from MS (it needed to be easier), and there are now 100s (possibly 1000s) of blog posts on how to deploy Nano server. Instead of sticking to their guns and just writing more documentation, and releasing guides, they went to work and added a minimal and interactive UI to the server (this was a big no-no at the beginning), and they've recently released a comprehensive GUI tool that helps you create OS images to be used for deployment
The Office team could stand to see the writing on the wall and do the same: Make deployments easy.
Dec 06 2016 09:01 PM
Jan 06 2017 04:03 AM
Jan 06 2017 07:38 AM
Hi Martijn,
Thanks for your reply. Please reference the following article for deploying Office 365 ProPlus on RDS - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn782858.aspx. You might have already referenced this page and caught that Windows Sever 2016 is not currently listed, but we are in the process of getting the article updated to list that Windows Server 2016 is supported to deploy Office 365 ProPlus via RDS
Please let me know if this article doesn't address the guidance that you're looking for - thanks!
Regards,
John Gruszczyk
Jan 07 2017 05:33 AM
Hello John,
As long as it is supported on Windows Server 2016 then I will manage.
Martijn
Jan 17 2017 03:04 PM
Good Evening. The article John mentioned has been updated https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn782858.aspx
Jan 27 2017 05:17 AM
Oct 06 2016 03:42 PM
SolutionThis is fantastic.
The deployment 'how to' technet articles were functional, but a best practice guide is just what we needed.
Thank you!!