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Manage Office 365 Software Downloads
Manage Office 365 Software Downloads
Difficulty
Beginner
Duration
1h 10m
Students
1810
Ratings
4.7/5
Description

This Planning Office 365 Workloads and Applications course will teach you how to plan for Office 365 workload deployments and hybrid solutions. You will learn how to identify hybrid requirements for Exchange and SharePoint hybrid solutions, and how to plan connectivity and data flow for Office 365 services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. You’ll learn how to plan migration strategies for Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams, and how to determine the best strategies.

Later in the course, you will learn how to plan Office 365 application deployments and how to plan application updates. You’ll also learn about the different update channels and when to use each.

Learning Objectives

  • How to plan for Office 365 workload deployments
  • How to plan for migrations and hybrid solutions
  • How to plan for Office 365 application deployments

Intended Audience

  • IT professionals who are interested in obtaining an Microsoft 365 certification
  • Those tasked with planning Office 365 deployments and migrations

Prerequisites

  • A decent understanding of Office 365 workloads, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams
Transcript

Office 365 provides administrators the ability to control which office software users can download and install from Office 365. These options are configured from the software downloads settings page. 

When you elect to make some pieces of software unavailable to end users, those users will see a message on their software page that indicates the admin has turned off office installs instead of seeing an install button. It's important to understand when working with these options that they apply to all users. You cannot configure these settings on a user-by-user basis. When you roll out Office 365 ProPlus, you need to decide how often end-users will get feature updates. This decision will depend on quite a few factors. 

First, you'll need to identify how many different add-ins, or macros, will need to be tested each time there is a feature update to Office, Project or Visio. Businesses that utilize specialized Excel workbooks would be a good example. 

If a business such as this uses complex macros, add-ins and other integrations, the business might want to consider getting feature updates only every six months. By doing so, the business has time to test all the new features before rolling them out to users. That said, if that same business employs users that don't use all of that complex stuff, the businesses Office 365 administrator, could make the feature updates available for those users more often, by manually downloading and installing the Office Apps for those users by using the Office Deployment Tool. By doing so, the administrator has more control over feature update settings for different groups of users. In situations where the administrator doesn't want to have users installing software themselves, the administrator can download the software to the local network, and then leverage any existing deployment tools, like SCCM, or even Group Policy, to deploy the software to the end users. 

Manually deploying Office, Project and Visio, requires the use of the Office Deployment Tool, which is a free tool that can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center. With the Office Deployment Tool, you can download and deploy Office to the end user community. 

Now, Office isn't the only application that you can deploy to your end users. For example, you can download InfoPath and SharePoint Designer, from the Microsoft Download Center, so they can be deployed to your end users. After deploying these apps, you can use your existing software deployment tools, such as SCCM, to deploy them to end users. 

It's important to note that when planning a roll out of Office applications, the end users have to be local administrators on their computers if you want to allow them to install the Office software themselves. In organizations that remove local admin access for their end users, the administrators will need to perform the installs for the end users instead. 

It's also important to remember that users need to have an Office 365 license assigned to them before they can install Office 365 software. This should be a no-brainer, but for whatever reason, seems to get overlooked quite often.

About the Author
Students
90559
Courses
89
Learning Paths
56

Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.

In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.

In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.