How to Install M365 Apps with MEMCM Installer. This guide will show you step by step how to create the M365 Apps installation package using the built-in installer in MEMCM.
Note: Microsoft rebranded Office 365 to Microsoft 365 Apps. MEMCM at version 2010 (or ConfigMgr or SCCM etc) have not updated their console, and still call M365 Apps by it’s old Office 365 name. The name Office 365 is thoroughly worked into my blood, but I will try to stay consistent with the new name in this guide.
The Office Customization Tool used by MEMCM also don’t support the configuration to set the installation as silent (hint Microsoft, please update that), and we will fix that as well to ensure we end up with a M365 Apps / Office 365 installation package that installs silently.
Install M365 Apps with MEMCM
Navigate to “Software Library -> Office 365 Client Management” and click on Office 365 Installer. The Microsoft Office 365 Client Installation Wizard will open.
I use Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise in the name while writing this guide. Use a UNC path for the content location. MEMCM downloads the source files to this location. Enter a description if you like (optional), and click next to continue.
Click the “Go to the Office Customization Tool”.
The office customization tool will open up. I select the 64-bit version and Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise as the office suite, and “Monthly Enterprise Channel” as the update channel. I did not select any Visio, Project or any other additional products.
Select the Office products you want to install as part of this M365 Apps / Office 365 installation.
Note that OneDrive (Groove) is out of support from January 11, 2021 and should not be selected or installed. I also don’t want to install Skype for Business as I selected Teams to be installed in this package. Background service for Microsoft search in Bing is also something I don’t need to install.
Select the primary language, and any additional languages and proofing tools to be installed.
Logging is no longer supported in the Office Deployment Tool so go ahead and disable that. Microsoft should remove that option from this wizard to avoid the confusion. Log files are by default stored in the %temp% folder.
The upgrade options is a feature that allows M365 Apps / Office 365 to remove previous installations of Office, and even upgrade between different architectures (32-bit <-> 64-bit). I did not select to uninstall Visio and Project as I’m also not installing these with this installation package.
Automatically accept the EULA on behalf of your users prevents the EULA from being displayed the first time a user opens Office. Disable this if you require your users to accept the EULA when opening Office for the first time.
Type the name of your organization
Configure the default file format. The Office Open XML formats is the .docx used by Word, .xlsx by Excel etc, which is the one used by most organizations.
Review the current settings to ensure it is the correct configuration that you want to implement. Go ahead and click submit once you are done.
We will modify the configuration.xml file to make the installation truly silent before we distribute and deploy the application, so select no to this.
The summary page will give a brief summary of the configuration of the M365 Apps creation.
The progress phase may take a while as it is downloading the M365 apps / Office 365 installation files from Microsoft for the products we selected. The files are stored in the source content folder that we specified earlier in the installation wizard.
The installation wizard will complete. Note that if you get an error, it is most likely due to internet connectivity.
I always validate that MEMCM have successfully downloaded the installation files and created an application to install M365 Apps for Enterprise. We can see from the pictures below that both have happened
M365 Apps for Enterprise Silent Installation
The current Office Customization Tool used by MEMCM 2010 do not support the setting to hide the splash screen and make the installation completely silent. I want Office to install silently and I don’t want the splash screen to appear during installation. We have to modify the configuration.xml manually to hide the splash screen and install Office 365 silently. Let’s modify it before we distribute the application to the distribution points.
Configuration.xml is located in the content location folder that we specified in the wizard. Change Display Level=”FULL” to “OFF”, illustrated in the image below.
With that change in place in the configuration.xml, you can install M365 apps with MEMCM as you finally have a silent installer. Go ahead and distribute it to the distribution points and deploy it to a test collection so you can test and verify that it installs silently on a machine.
This is the end result when I deployed it to a collection with one of my test machines. Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise shows up in software center.
Thank you for following my guide on how to install M365 Apps with MEMCM.
Next step: Check out my blog post on how to Automate the updating of the M365 apps installation package.
One thought to “Install M365 Apps with MEMCM Installer – Step by Step”