Office 2019 & WSUS?

So, with the changes present in what MS is forcing on us for volume licensed versions of Office 2019 (Click To Run instead of MSI based), we've had to make several changes in the configuration of new systems.

No more just running each piece as needed (Office + Visio + Project + whatever else), we have to have a configuration XML file that allows for each combination. Not that big a deal.

However, I'm completely stuck as to how to get it to work it as far as future updates go. I know there's the entry in the configuration for <Updates Enabled="TRUE" UpdatePath="\\wsusserver\Office_2019\" />

But, I don't really know how to get it to actually populate with updates, and how to propagate to the 20-ish child servers the way Office 2010-2016 updates do. I don't exactly want to have thousands of computers hitting the internet to download gigabytes worth of Office updates just because it's running 2019 instead of 2016. But, I also don't others all trying to come back to the corporate headquarters, when we've got a hundred at a satellite location with their own perfectly capable server onsite? And how to do we exclude updates that break things? I know there have been a few Outlook updates that broke PDF integration in the past couple of years, and we just held off until they patched their patch.

How are we supposed to handle this if we're unable to use WSUS?

Typical Microsoft HUA (Head Up...).

burritoincognito said:

How are we supposed to handle this if we're unable to use WSUS?

Click to expand...

If you're that large, I suspect Microsoft expects you to use SCCM.

ND40oz said:

If you're that large, I suspect Microsoft expects you to use SCCM.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't be surprised by that, but we found PDQ Deploy to be a better option when we were comparing it to SCCM. It handled most of the same things that we were looking into SCCM for, at a fraction of the cost, if I remember correctly. I guess we may need to revisit that.

If you really want to use a local path to update it but you're spread out over multiple locations, use DFS share and you'll need to manually populate it from the CDN whenever a new version is released.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/office2019/update

ND40oz said:

If you really want to use a local path to update it but you're spread out over multiple locations, use DFS share and you'll need to manually populate it from the CDN whenever a new version is released.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/office2019/update

Click to expand...

That's not a bad idea! I already have that set up to hit all our servers anyway for me to place things that I need to push to all the child servers anyway.

burritoincognito said:

That's not a bad idea! I already have that set up to hit all our servers anyway for me to place things that I need to push to all the child servers anyway.

Click to expand...

Exactly, update it on one location and let DFS handle the replication to all of your remote ones.

What I ended up doing was setting up a folder on my WSUS server that ran a script once a month to download the latest version of the C2R installer. Then I used IIS to setup a site pointing to this folder. There's just a MIME change you need to make.

When deploying Office 19, I configured the configuration.xml file to point to that url to install from and download updates. As the location updates it allows the clients to update. You can also use GPO to set the update location after the fact.

Use this as a resource.
https://www.anexinet.com/blog/use-website-office-click-run-update-source/

Part of the reason I chose the URL method instead of UNC is that I have some domains that don't talk to each other.