Mac Office 365 shared computer activation?

[dstranathan]

Has anyone had any luck with installing & licensing Office 365 on shared/common Macs?

Most of my Macs are deployed 1-to-1, but we have a few Macs that are shared/common. These Macs still have 2011 volume or retail licenses. Im going to transition the shard/common Macs to Office 2016 (with Office 365 licenses), but not sure how to assign them.

Microsoft has a solution to this problem as seen in the link below.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/uspartner_ts2team/2014/09/03/office-365-shared-computer-activation/

But Im not sure this applies to Macs...?

[jack_bishop]

This looks like it applies to O365 Pro Plus which doesn't exist for Mac. The only other option you have is to use the Volume License Serializer, if you have access to it. I think this is also the only option if you don't want to have users manually activate (login).

The software is functionally the same regardless of the license you use.

[dstranathan]

Thanks for a sainty check @jack_bishop. I didnt think this existed for Mac.

Im using the Volume License Serializer now (a 2 pkg installer process). But boss wanted me to try and adopt the Office 365 shared computer activation (like he uses on the WIndows side) - which I was unable to locate for the Mac.

[bentoms]

@dstranathan FWIW, you've picked the next out of the two choices we have on the Mac platform.

MS have not implemented a 3rd option for us.

[talkingmoose]

If you have the volume license serializer then you should also have the full installer, which includes the serializer components. No need to use both. Just run the installer by itself.

[JoshRouthier]

I know its late, but thought it might be worth posting if someone else is looking into Shared Activations for Office 2016 for Mac. Paul Bowden has a great tool on Github for doing this: https://github.com/pbowden-msft/O365SharedActivator

[barnesaw]

I thought the whole point of the common codebase was to make it the same across OSes. Why does Windows get shared computer activation but Macs don't?

I like what Paul is trying to do, but that isn't anywhere close to what is needed since it still eats an install.

[talkingmoose]

@barnesaw, the common codebase for Office applications was only a step toward feature parity across platforms. It didn't level the playing field, though. Its primary purpose was to make keeping parity across platforms with new features going forward and maybe allow some highly-requested features to surface where they didn't exist before.

First, some things may never come to macOS simply because the features in the Windows version could be dependent on something in the OS not within the applications themselves. That should be a very small sub-section of features.

Also, the common code base was for specific apps — Excel, PowerPoint and Word. If Outlook moves to share its codebase across platforms, that will only happen over time. The two applications are just too different to make a shared codebase possible. OneDrive and OneNote are also not part of the shared code. Maybe the will be some day.

And licensing issues like shared computer activation are handled independently of the apps.

With all that said, I'm pretty sure I've heard @pbowden mention his team is working on something for shared computer activation beyond his Office 365 Shared Activator tool. I don't recall any time frame for this. He'll likely come along and correct me if I'm wrong about what I think I've heard.