Office 2016 changes for Munki and AutoPkg

Sources and Further Reading

Demystify Office 2016 for Mac is a super-comprehensive breakdown of the changes in Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac. It was a bit too comprehensive for me. I kind of wanted just a bottom line, which the autopkg-discuss mailing list helped me with, and which I’ll summarize below.

General Gist of Procedure

If you were using Munki and AutoPkg before with Office 2016 and simply distributing a single /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.plist as a payload to clients, you need to instead re-download the new .iso from Microsoft’s volume licensing site and distribute volume licensing (see two methods below) to clients.

Also make the following (credit: link above) the preinstall script (to get rid of the previous .plist if you were distributing that):

#!/bin/bash
#
# Check for the existence of Microsoft’s licensing file. If it exists, remove
# it prior to running Microsoft_Office_2016_VL_Serializer.pkg.
if [ -f ‘/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.plist’ ]; then
/bin/rm -f ‘/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.plist’
fi
exit 0

When the clients install that new package, it will create a /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.plist that is unique to the machine.

Method 1

Note: This method didn’t actually work for me, but based on everything I’ve read, it should work, so I’m still presenting it as a possibility.

Just get the Microsoft_Office_2016_VL_Serializer.pkg (which can import directly into Munki) from the .iso and distribute that out (with the above preinstall script).

Method 2

Note: This method did work for me, but it’s a bit convoluted and involves (without repackaging the whole thing) the client machines having to download over a 1 GB of a .pkg to not install most of it.

Basically, run

installer -showChoiceChangesXML -pkg /PATH/TO/PACKAGE/Microsoft_Office_2016_Volume_Installer-15.##.pkg -target /

and then you’ll get a bunch of installer choices (Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

Using the Munki Wiki guide on ChoiceChangesXML, deselect all the actual parts of Office except for the licensing, fonts, and framework.

Then, input the .pkg into Munki and paste the modified choice changes array, and take out the receipts for all the other packages (I basically left in receipts for only com.microsoft.pkg.licensing and com.microsoft.pkg.licensing.volume).

Make that an update-for package for any of the Office 2016 programs, and include the above preinstall script.