New Office 365 Desktop Application Deployment Capabilities In Microsoft Intune

Over the last couple of months we've seen different ways of deploying Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus to Windows 10 PCs, first up we saw the option inside of Intune for Education, and then last week at Inspire we saw how this works from the Office 365 portal in Microsoft 365 Business. For those who aren't using either of those options, but still want an incredibly easy way to deploy Office 365 Pro Plus and Office 365 Business.

First of all, in the Azure Portal, open the Intune blade and click on Mobile apps.

Once in Mobile apps, you can see more options for app management, and we start by clicking on the Apps link.

I've already synchronised this account with Windows Store for Business, so you can see some of the default apps that it adds to the app list. From here we click Add.

From the drop down we choose Office 365 Pro Plus Suite (Windows 10) , which as you will see also works for those of you with Office 365 Business or Office 365 Business Plans.

Starting with Configure App Suite, it's not very likely that you will need to select all of the options, but in this case I've just done it to make sure I get all of the application icons exposed.

Next up is App Suite Information, all we really need to do here is populate the Suite Name and Suite Description fields, the others are either pre-populated or not required.

App Suite Settings gives the chance to select 32 or 64 bit, Update Channel, EULA and shared computer activation, along with additional languages.

Once configured we Add the app.

The blue notification bar advises that we need to Assign application to at least one user group, 'Click Assignments' .

I've already got a group set up for deployment, so I can Select that group.

Next I will make the app Required to kick start the installation process on the client.

Switching over the Intune MDM enrolled Windows 10 client, you can see that the Click-To-Run installer pieces are running, as displayed in Task Manager.

As this is going to be over 1GB in size, it might take a while to download, depending on your connection speed.

Once the installation is complete you we can see the Office Pro Plus applications on the Start menu.

Here's where the Pro Plus versus Business conversation starts. As you can see, the expected version of Office is installed. However, it hasn't automatically activated because this user doesn't have Pro Plus/E3/E5 license assigned, they only have Office 365 Business.

If I close Word and then reopen it, you can see that the edition has changed from Pro Plus to Business, no additional configuration required.

And finally, once Office has been reconfigured itself as office 365 Business, everything is ready to go.