Reset Microsoft 365 Apps activation state

Microsoft
7 Replies

@Matt_Philipenko Awesome - I will have this pinned. Often needed in troubleshooting scenarios to just clear things up. I'd love if you could add a button somewhere in Office GUI to simply "Remove license" so we more easily can guide the user.

I have pinned this as well.

First, thank you so much for this valuable information! I wish there was an easy "Unregister" button for Office! This lead to me find your article, which lead to me to write a PowerShell script around your 4 tenets here; however, I only realized after that you had a provided a VBS script of your own. I found there is quite a bit more going on under the hood and it certainly is impressive! I don't mean to insinuate your script is not appropriate for our environment, but how much "cleaning" would I be sacrificing if I were to just use the information in the article versus the script. Again, thank you very much for work! Take care and happy new years!

@eacartwright 

 

Thanks for the feedback!  You can totally use just the steps in the script.  Before the script it's all we had in the beginning. The only thing I would caution on is if using Windows 10 there are some additional settings that might need to be cleared validate the Workplace join accounts are removed.

 

While this article is superbly appreciated in the end, thank you Matt!!! ... it is unbelievable and unacceptable that Microsoft still subjects your paying customers to this nonsense.  As a very technical consumer and part-time multiple company IT admin with 100s of Windows installs and much much more under my belt over 30 years, after purchasing a great second-hand Thinkpad in March 2020 and refreshing its Windows 10 Pro 64bit to factory clean setup, I then proceeding to have to pull all-nighter just to try to figure this activation thing out.  I guess the previous owner must have had ProPlus corporate licensed or something and even a Windows re-install didn't clear the activation.  Just fricking wow!  Absolutely, unequivocally ridiculous and unacceptable that such licensing activation nonsense exists in the first place.  If I didn't have my experience and stubbornness, I would have had to literally throw this perfectly great computer in the garbage.  Get your product managers and "software engineers" (ha, the term is still ironic and brings shame to the discipline of actual for real *engineering*) to stop anti-customer designs!  Seriously!  Enough is enough, we're 20 years into the 21st century now, time to learn to engineer software systems by now!

 

Grrrrrrrr ....

@aleyn 

 

Thank you for the feedback I will make sure I share the details with engineering. We have made considerable improvements with activation in versions post 1909 of Office. Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns. 

Hi Matt,

Do you have a step by step on how to run the script as I am encountering some difficulty and include some screen shots if the steps?

We are encountering devices where the licence on desktop apps is not being 'over written' by users who have an A3 365 licence and need to clear what ever licence is being held by the desktop apps.

Thanks in advance