Issues installing Office 365 form Self Service

[Scotty]

Is anyone else having issues with installing Office 365 from Self Service? Basically, Office apps are failing to start, kinda randomly. It seems to work on most of my test boxes but then fails on user machines. I did get one of my test boxes finally. Sometimes the app just does nothing, sometimes we get an error like the one attached.

Odd because installing them manually never seems to have an issue. Makes me think I'm doing something wrong with Jamf. Policy logs all look fine.

[Scotty]

anyone?

I did some more testing and confirmed, its only when I install office via Self Service. I have tried 3 versions of office 365 (16.33, .38, .39)

[Scotty]

anyone? Do I not tag right or something I feel like I never get and feedback here.

What I know so far. -Its outlook and word that has the issue
-Its only when I use Jamf to install, Self Service, Policy forced, PreCached or DL/Instal on Demand
-I even tried a script to download and install the latest 365 (bypassing Jamf mostly) and it still has the issue
-works fine running the PKG form desktop, or using the DL/Install script.

[ooshnoo]

Our policy downloads it right from MS..that way the latest version is installed all the time.

https://gist.github.com/talkingmoose/a16ca849416ce5ce89316bacd75fc91a

[merps · Accepted solution]

We've been seeing this issue on fresh builds - I think .35 was the last one that didn't have problems.

The cause seems to be improper permissions on some items in the user folder.

Check ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office to see if it's owned by root. Mine was.

Here is the snippet we used to fix the issue:

username=$(/usr/bin/python -c 'from SystemConfiguration import SCDynamicStoreCopyConsoleUser; import sys; username = (SCDynamicStoreCopyConsoleUser(None, None, None) or [None])[0]; username = [username,""][username in [u"loginwindow", None, u""]]; sys.stdout.write(username + "
");')

groupname=`stat -f%g /dev/console`

for USER_HOME in /Users/*
  do
  USER_UID=`basename "${USER_HOME}"`
  if [ ! "${USER_UID}" = "Shared" ] && [ ! "${USER_UID}" = "adminaccountname" ]
    then 
      if [ -d "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Preferences/ByHost ]
           then
                /bin/chmod -R 700 "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office
                /usr/sbin/chown -R "${USER_UID}":"staff" "${USER_HOME}"/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office
                ScriptLogging "Modified "${USER_HOME}" for user "${USER_UID}""
      fi
  fi
  done

[Scotty]

Yup we just figured that out. Reapply the home user folder pemissions fixes the issues... why? This only happens when we deply the product via Jamf. Also, @ooshnoo, I test that out (found it just before you posted it lol) and it does the same thing. Again, when we run that script manually it has no issues, but when we let Jhamf run it, boom, broken.

@ooshnoo, curious, when you use the script are you using the checksum check? or just letting it go without checking the checksum? Regardless of the issue in question, I want to move our "on-demand" self service installer to this so that one less PKG I have to deal with.

[Scotty]

We did figure out the source of this. It was a separate script that was copying our corporate power point templates to the machine before Office. It was creating the folders if missing and messing up permissions.