Microsoft Office 16 (15.15) Installer PKG (3GB instead of 1 GB), gets Corrupted in Casper Imaging

[johnklimeck]

Concerning the new MS Office 16 pkg installer, 15.15

If you get it straight from Microsoft, it is 1.1x GB in size, and it installs fine from Casper Imaging (and rather quickly).

But for some reason on reboot, login and first launch of any MS Office 16 app, a message comes up saying it is needs to be re-installed. A Self Service re-install does this trick, and Office 16 opens fine.

I used Composer (9.81) to re package the Office PKG, doing a snapshot, and that is working....

But this PKG is 3 GB, instead of 1 GB, and takes 3-4 minutes to install from Casper Imaging. Something is up...

Thx, John K

[donmontalvo]

@johnklimeck Curious, is the 1.1x GB installer a full volume installer?

[Brad_G]

Because of how Apple wants developers to write apps they are "sandboxed" now. So what was once a shared library of components (Office 2011 for example) these now get replicated for each application. So if you take a MS Office 2016 installer it's a bit over 1GB. When you install (hence your composer snapshot) it takes and replicates those library files to each of the apps installed. Thus in the end you've got 3+GB of data to repackage.

Is this a volume license installer you're having trouble with? What version of the apps are installed with your MS installer? They've had several hiccups in the installer process when using tools such as Casper. They recently provided us with a new VL installer that puts down version 15.15 of the apps. It's been a better experience than our earlier releases.

[calumhunter]

Don't repackage using composer snapshots - thats ugly and likely to give you problems either now or later down the track - use the vendor provided packages

The latest VLA from MS, the ISO with X20-52737 in the name is the updated one that works with Casper/Munki ect ect

You should have no problems deploying that and it will licence appropriately... Theres still issues with users being prompted to trust the MAU daemon, but thats another story.

As has been said. the 1.3Gb VLA installer copies shared components into each apps bundle so you end up with multiple copies of the same data just in each app bundle.

The updaters from MS also work this way and they are full app installers thats why each update is about 1Gb or so.

The VLA installs 15.13.4, but we are now up to 15.15

Patch management still sucks in Casper so you'll have to jump through hoops to deal with it nicely

For me i just dump Office 2016 VLA installer package into munki and let autopkg handle the office updates and it just works no mess no fuss

[ooshnoo]

i just always download the latest full installer package from our O365 portal. It always is the latest version. Of course that doesn't help you guys if you're not using O365

[alexjdale]

Oh god, don't repackage Office 2016, there is no reason to do that. Just use the installer and then do whatever you need on top of that. I use the O365 15.15.0 installer and then write the volume license plist so it doesn't need to activate.

Snapshot packages should be incredibly rare special cases, I don't have a single package built with Composer snapshots.