MD-101 Managing Modern Desktops – Managing and Deploying Apps and Data Part 2

4. Looking at the Office 365 subscriptions

And I want to talk to you about the different Office licenses and how we can check to see what particular licenses we have in our environment. And we’re going to compare the different licenses. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go over here to this little menu button. We’re going to go to Azure Active Directory. I’m in by the way. I’m in portal azure. com. All right? And then I’m going to go to licenses. I’m going to go to all products. And here are my different licenses I have. And I want to kind of focus on the Office products. Here I have two of those. So I’ve got an E five and an F three. Okay, so first thing I want to encourage you to do, microsoft has pretty clear information on their site involving what the different subscriptions are.

So if you actually go out there and you were to search Office 365, let’s say E five subscription, if you just search that, you’ll see there’s an article right here you can look at directly about E five if you want. But you’ve also got an option that says compare Microsoft 365 Enterprise. Compare office. Enterprise. I’m going to go with that one. And they break it down for you. So they tell you all these different plans, what they are per month. And what’s great about it is you get these little check marks that tell you. So you have a nice little table here that breaks down what the features are that you get, okay? So you’re going to notice, get all these different options, all these different features. Now as far as the F three goes, you can do the same thing, office Three, six, five, F three.

Just search that, you’ll find an article on it. You can look at the exact options you get. Okay, but I’m going to show you now that I’ve shown you, hey, use the articles, they’re helpful. But I also want to show you now how I can see exactly what these subscriptions have just from within the Azure Portal. Okay? So we’ll go back over to the Azure Portal and we’re going to click on the Office 365 E Five. We’re going to go to Service Plan Details, and here are all your different options. So look at all these things you get. Azure Rights Management, Common Data Services, Customer Lockbox. You get all these different features. And Microsoft has information on their site about every one of these products and what they do. Of course, some of this we’ve talked about, some of what we will talk about. What I want to kind of hone in on right here with you is this guy right here.

This is Microsoft 365 apps for Enterprise. It’s very important for you understand that. That is called also known as Pro Plus. Okay? They used to say Pro Plus in here and they’re slowly moving away from that terminology. But keep in mind if you’re taking the exam. The exam may still refer to this as Pro Plus. So it’s important to remember that. What is this exactly? This allows you to download the Office apps directly to your hard drive. So if you license that to somebody, they can actually download the Office apps. All right, the other thing I want to look at is this right here. This is called Office on the Web. Or Office for the Web. They used to call this Office Online and the name has changed here to Office for the Web. Keep in mind the exam may refer to it as Office Online. Okay? So Office for the Web, this allows somebody to access the online versions of Office.

In other words, it’s like them going to portal Office. If you go there, the apps that you see here, this is what that is going to give you. This is the license that’s going to give you. All right. Now I also want to show you that you can see all this license information from the Microsoft 365 Portal as well. So I’m going to go to admin here, which is basically admin dot Microsoft. com, or you can type Portal Microsoft. com and get to the same place. So then what I’m going to do is I’m going to drop down billing and it’s got licenses and I can see what my licenses are here as well. So as you can see, these are my subscriptions I’ve got, all right? And then I can go and click on those and see who’s licensed. I can see what we got.

But one thing I want to also point out to you, I want you to notice that if we look at the F Three license, your F Three license does not have the Apps for Enterprise. You do not have that on F Three. Okay? So looking back over here, watch this. We’ll click on F Three and we’ll click Service Plan Details and notice that it has Office for the Web, but it does not have apps or Enterprise. So right out of the gates, this is how you could very easily tell what you’re going to get with these subscriptions. When you have your license set up, you can see exactly what you’re going to get. But of course, before purchasing your license, I encourage you to go out there and look at the different comparisons because that’s going to help you get familiar with the different things that you’re going to get.

But right out of the gates, the big thing to know here is I’m going to get the Pro Plus with E five. I’m not with F. Three. Now there’s also an E three subscription. You’re going to find that the big difference between Office 365 E Three and Office 365 E Five is the E Five comes with a bunch of extra voiceover IP stuff. You can use Microsoft’s Online voiceover IP services. It ties into the PSTN Public Switch telephone network and all of that. That’s going to be your real difference there. The e three doesn’t come with all that extra voiceover and video over IP stuff like e five does, don’t get me wrong. Now, e three has teams and you can do video chatting and all that, just doesn’t have that voiceover IP capabilities that e five has.

But anyway, again, I encourage you to go out there and look at the comparisons yourself and see what these different options are. It’s going to give you a much better understanding of it. And remember that apps for enterprise, that’s what it’s called now. It used to be called pro plus, and the example referred to as that. The other thing would be the outlook on the web, outlook for the web, that’s formally known as office Online. Okay? So just keep all that in mind as well, all right? So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an understanding about these different subscriptions, and it gives you a way to get out there and look and compare and look at the cost and all of that.

5. Customizing the Office 365 ProPlus deployment with Office Deployment Tool & OCT

And I’m going to search for download ODT. Alright, you’re going to see a download link here. I’m going to click download office deployment tool. Alright, we’re going to click Download and it’s going to ask us to run it. All right? So we’re going to hit yes on that. And we’re going to accept the license terms. And I am going to put this on my C drive. Let me zoom in on that here. So we’ll expand this out, we’ll go to the C drive and we’re just going to create a folder called ODT on the C drive. All right, I don’t know if I put that in the right spot. Let’s do that again. There we go. ODT. All right, so we’ll click OK and it’s going to extract the tool into that folder.

All right. Now one thing I want to do is I want to encourage you to actually look up the Knowledge base article on ODT because you get a lot of good information on that article. So if you actually go and you just put in ODT tool, all right, you’ll have an overview of the ODT. And this is great because this little article sort of breaks down all your options, which I’m going to be showing you here in a second. But you can look at some of the more advanced switches here. You can see some examples of their XML. All right, but let’s see what they’re talking about here. So ultimately, in order to automate the installation of Office the way you want it, you have to use XML.

There’s an XML file and it is actually an answer file. This XML file will be injected into the package that’s going to be installed and then from there we’ll be able to have things customized. But we have to go in and edit this XML file first. So what I’m going to do is open up File Explorer, go to my C drive, and then there’s the ODT folder where the tool got extracted. So we’ll open that up, we’re going to zoom in on that and you’re going to notice that I’ve got some little files here. Let’s look at the file extensions. So we’ll say File extension, enable file Extension. And here are the file extensions. You’ll notice the setup program. This is what’s going to download Office for us.

Okay, these are what’s going to customize Office. So we’re going to use the 64 bit version. So we’re going to double click on that and we’re going to open it up with Notepad. All right, granted, you could get something that’s a little more XML friendly like Notepad Plus Plus or some of the XML editors. Either way, it’s just text. So I’m going to click OK. Now it’s going to open up Notepad and let’s take a look now at this XML file. Now, first thing, first order business is to just have a grasp on a little bit of XML and what it does. First off, XML is the Extensible Markup language and it uses tags like HTML does, like Hypertext Markup Language. Okay? The only difference is the great thing about it is it’s a very structured language that pretty much any software under the sun these days can understand.

So these little less than symbols and greater than symbols, these are basically specifying that you are wanting to make a tag. This particular tag is called a comment tag. So if I put less than symbol, exclamation mark dash, dash, I can put anything after that and I can write comments. So as you can see, they’re saying this is a sample. And then when you’re done with that comment, you’re just going to do greater than that symbol. I could put anything I want in here. I could actually delete this and it wouldn’t do anything because that comment doesn’t do anything anyway. It doesn’t get processed. The comment is just there for us when we’re editing all this. Okay? So right here is where things begin. It says configuration tag. This is where things are going to get started.

Notice there’s a starting configuration tag. At the very bottom, there’s an ending configuration tag, and it always has a slash. That’s to basically say you’re closing it out. Okay, so notice the syntax. It says Add Office 365 client edition equals 64. That’s 64 bit channel. This is going to be the update channel. It means it’s going to update every month. Product ID is Office 365 Pro plus retail. You could look up, there are some different product ID options, but this is the most common one, which we know that Pro Plus is the downloadable version of Office. You have languages if you wanted to specify some other languages, okay, for example, if I wanted to add Spanish US, I could actually add another one of these lines like this, all right? And I could add ESUs, and that’s going to add that Spanish tag if I wanted to, all right? If I don’t want to, I can remove it, I can add it.

That’s going to essentially what that’s going to do though? Is it’s going to allow us to add that Spanish language. You could look up all the language codes if you wanted to as well. Okay, right here I’ve got notice this is the opening product tag. This is the closing product tag. But notice they’re also doing another one of those product ID. Visio. They’re actually adding visio. Okay? If you were to install using this, there’s also Project. So Visio and Project, those are two extra Office products that you have to license. They don’t come with the normal Pro Plus app for Enterprise.

Okay? If I want, I could comment those out just by doing this, all right? I could put an ending one right here, or I could just completely wipe it out altogether, get rid of it altogether. And if I’m going to do that though, I’m going to actually want to wipe all this right here out, now that I think about it. All right. And then you can add some additional tags here that gets into enabling the channel and accepting the license agreement. So if I wanted to turn these on, all I got to do is just remove these tags, these comment tags, right? I’ll just remove those and then there we go. We got the configuration slashconfiguration finishing everything up. So now that I’ve done that, I’m going to save this. I’m going to say save as, okay, we’ll save it here in the ODT folder and we’re going to call it custom XML.

All right? Custom XML. We’ll hit save. All right, close out of that and we should have that custom XML file. Now if we go back and look at the Microsoft article about this, let’s take a look at it real quick. Zoom in. All right, show some examples on how to use it. Then if you wanted to download Office to your hard drive and inject the XML file into your version of Office, you could do it here. Okay. You could say setup, download, download, config. Notice again that there is a setup exe file in the folder. So this is what they’re talking about. They’re saying you could type this setupdownload and then whatever the name of your XML is that you want and it will configure it based on that. Here’s some other examples. This is where they’re specifying a specific version of Office they want.

And they’re also specifying 32 bit. They’re also notice in this example, they’re specifying a path that they want this to get deployed. So what they’re saying here is download Office off the website, off Microsoft’s website and then store it in this location serverbashare. Okay? Here’s an example of them excluding publisher. So if you wanted to exclude a particular app, you could use exclude app ID. You just got to look up the app IDs is all. Okay? All right. Another way you can do this, you can just go ahead and run, set up and have it download and install Office and just say use my XML. So you can do that as well if you want it, all right? So I can go in there and choose that slash configure option and do that if I want. So in fact, I’ll come to command prompt right now for you.

We’ll take a look at that. So we’ll go to command prompt. This is not something that has to be ran in PowerShell. Obviously if you wanted to run it in PowerShell though, you could. Okay. Oh, before I do that, actually, let me show you the Office customization tool. Okay. So I’m going to go to custom I’m sorry, config Office, that’s the website. And then I’m going to click to sign in. All right, let me just get command prompt open here. While we’re doing this command prompt, my computer is being a little laggy this morning. All right, so run as Administrator. There we go. Have that open. Okay, this is really awesome. Now I want to tell you, we didn’t have this, this has only been available for about a year, but what this is going to do, so you saw me doing all that XML stuff a second ago.

This tool is actually going to help us create the XML file without having to understand all that XML. Okay? So we’ll click to create and then I can name this file anything I want. Like I called it custom XML. And then from there it’s basically just a form you fill out. You go through this form and you answer all the questions, what you want, what you don’t want, update Channel, you have all these drop downs that you can fill out once you fill out this higher up options and then once you’re done, you can download the XML file. Okay, so very cool, very easy way of getting things done here. All right, zoom out here. Okay, so go back to command prompt now and we’re going to go backslash to ODT.

We’re in the ODT folder here and we’re going to run that setup command. So we’re going to say setup configure custom XML. All right? So we’re going to hit enter on that and at that point it’s going to use my XML to install Office. Now again, keep in mind I could also download this. I could have this then deployed using Intune. I could use third party. You can actually do this too with the help of Sccm or Endpoint Configuration Manager, all that stuff. Okay, so that’s the purpose of ODT, the Office deployment tools to help you customize using an answer file.

And the Office Customization tool is a newer tool that assists that ODT by helping you build a configuration file graphically as opposed to having to use XML. Okay? It’s still all XML in the end. It’s just this tool helps you from having to know and understand all that XML stuff. All right, that gives you guys a good understanding of ODT and the Oct. All right? And from there, as you can see, it’s not too difficult. Definitely something you should go ahead and give a shot, try it out. And remember, use those Knowledge base articles.