Summary:Learn about the updated Office Deployment Tool for Office 365 Click-to-Run desktop applications.
If you are an IT Pro administrator who has signed up for Office 365, you likely already know that you can choose whether to allow users to install Office 365 ProPlus (and Project Pro, Visio Pro, SharePoint Designer, or Lync products) directly from the Office 365 portal. This is the default option. As an alternative, in managed environments, you can use the Office Deployment Tool to manage Click-to-Run installations if end users do not have permission to install software from the Office 365 portal, or they are not local administrators on their computers. You can use the Office Deployment Tool to stage an on-premises deployment.
On 2/14/2013, the Office engineering team released an updated version of the Office Deployment Tool.
The current release of the Office Deployment Tool supports packager mode which is used to create App-V packages from Office 2013 Click-to-Run installation sources. You prepare a configuration.xml file and run the tool in packager mode.
We are working on content about how to install Click-to-Run Office products by using App-V and we will post a blog about that when the content is ready. For information about deploying Office as a sequenced Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) package, see KB 2772509, Supported scenarios for deploying Microsoft Office as a sequenced App-V Package.
You download the Office Deployment Tool from the Microsoft Download Center site. If you are new to the Office Deployment Tool, the download includes a sample Configuration.xml file. To customize a Click-to-Run for Office 365 installation, you run the Office Deployment Tool and provide a custom Configuration.xml configuration file. The Office Deployment Tool performs the tasks that are specified by using the optional properties in the configuration file.
You can modify the Configuration.xml file to specify the following Click-to-Run installation options:
- Product and languages to install or remove
- Source path
- Level of user interface to display
- Logging options
- Product updates behavior
For more information, see the following resources:
- Content roadmap for Office 365 ProPlus
- Click-to-Run overview
- Customization overview for Click-to-Run
- Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run
- Click-to-Run for Office 365 Configuration.xml file
- Download Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool
- Deploy Click-to-Run for Office 365 products by using the Office Deployment Tool