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How to Tell the Difference Between Office 365 Licenses & Non-Office 365 licenses?

  • May 10, 2016
  • 5 replies
  • 41 views
dstranathan
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Does anyone know how to tell the two products apart in a way that could be monitored via an Extension Attribute or Smart Group?

Most of my Macs have Office 365-based licenses, but we have some loosey-goosey stand-alone (site) licenses too (mainly one-off shared/common Macs, etc). In the past (pre-JAMF) it was a challenge for IT to keep track of what Macs had a stand-alone license.

The Office 2016 applications themselves are virtually the same. But I assume there must be a .plist file (or a specific key/value pair inside a .plist somewhere) that JAMF can sniff-out ad flag as a non-365 license.

Has anyone done this?

    5 replies

    J
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    • jriv
    • Contributor
    • May 10, 2016

    We have a mix of Office 365 and non-365 users as well. I'm seeing /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Office365Service.app on some users so I assume this must be the difference. I'm not sure if this has changed with the 2016 version.

    dstranathan
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    • dstranathan
    • Author
    • Valued Contributor
    • May 10, 2016

    I have poked around the file systems on my Macs and don't see any obvious differences between the two. One directory that I initally thought was unique to O365 was this:

    /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office365

    But this directory actually will get generated on non-O365 Macs if a 3rd-party plug-in is installed (example: EndNote X7 installs its Word 2016 plug-in here, regardless if Office 2016 has a O365 license or not). So this folder is not the "canary in the coal mine" that I was looking for.

    Gotta be unique setttings lurking in a plist or other resource file somehere...

    D
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    • davehahn
    • New Contributor
    • May 11, 2016

    I'm thinking the existence of /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.plist tells you that the license is not O365.

    O
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    • Over9000
    • Contributor
    • August 30, 2016

    Anyone find a solution to this?

    D
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    • danwestbrook
    • New Contributor
    • April 7, 2017

    I'm also looking into some similar, found this earlier.... https://github.com/talkingmoose/Casper-Scripts/blob/master/ReportOffice2016License.sh will test it out later on.

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