Office 2019 / 365 Deployment

Hi everyone

Today I wanted to share some tips to deploy Microsoft Office 2019 to multiple computers.

The new way to deploy it differ from the older version as you now need to modify an XML file with the setup.exe

In the past we could do a customized setup by running the setup wizard, setup.exe /admin, which was creating a custom file for the setup. Now it’s all XML’s based.

First, you might need that setup if you use internally a KMS’s server:

Microsoft Office 2019 Volume License Pack

This download is needed for administrators to set up activation for volume license editions of Office 2019, Project 2019, or Visio 2019 by using either the Key Management Service (KMS) or Active Directory.

After that download we will go find the deployment tool:

Office Deployment Tool

The Office Deployment Tool (ODT) is a command-line tool that you can use to download and deploy Office 365 ProPlus to your client computers. The ODT gives you more control over an Office installation: you can define which products and languages are installed, how those products should be updated, and whether or not to display the install experience to your users.

We now have everything we need, from there after we need to edit the XML file to add the option we need.

An example XML;

<Configuration>
<Add SourcePath=”\\Server\Share”
OfficeClientEdition=”32″
Channel=”Broad” >
<Product ID=”O365ProPlusRetail”>
<Language ID=”en-us” />
<Language ID=”ja-jp” />
</Product>
<Product ID=”VisioProRetail”>
<Language ID=”en-us” />
<Language ID=”ja-jp” />
</Product>
</Add>
<Updates Enabled=”TRUE”
UpdatePath=”\\Server\Share” />
<Display Level=”None” AcceptEULA=”TRUE” />
<Logging Level=”Standard” Path=”%temp%” />
</Configuration>

We can see all XML options there, Configuration options for the Office Deployment Tool. As stated inside that article, and I confirm it too, it’s way easier now to use online tool on config.office.com (https://config.office.com/deploymentsettings)

Now with a XML ready, we are now ready to issue a first command with the deployment tool;

setup.exe /download configuration.xml

The command will download the specific files needed to do the deployment. I suggest to copy those files to a central store to deploy to multiple machines.

Now we run that command to actually install the product;

setup.exe /configure configuration.xml