Deploying the “New” Office 365 ProPlus

J.J. Antequino

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Over the past few weeks, I have been putting together an SMB demo experience.

As I was looking into various ways of deploying the new version of Office 365 Professional Plus, I stumbled upon the “Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run.”  By now, you may already know that the next version of Professional Plus will come in a two flavors: A “fully” installed volume licensing version and an Office 365 subscription version.

There are pros and cons to both versions, but what I love about the Click-to-Run version is that it runs in a “sand-boxed” environment….. which means I can run an earlier version of Office along side of it.  For example, if I have a custom application plug-in that still requires Office 2003 or 2007, I can install the Click-to-Run version simultaneously.  With the VL version, I would have to completely uninstall the previous version of Office on my machine.

So back to the Office Deployment Tool…. If you head on over to: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219422(v=office.15).aspx  you will see how the tool works.

It is a command line utility that basically allows you to download the Click-to-Run streaming elements and store them locally or on a share.  You would then be able to point all your client machines to that location instead of sending them out across the Internet each time.