Microsoft Office 365 Pro Plus (2019) and setting MAU to check monthly

[skywada]

Hi everyone! I have hopefully a simple question, but since I am new to this game, I was wondering if I can get some expertise (I also posted in the macadmins slack for their advice as well).

Basically, my university is providing students with macbooks that will not be managed by us. However, we are going to use jamf to push out programs for the students to use, one being office 365. The problem I am encountering is that my department wants to set the MAU to monthly rather than the defaulted daily check, but I can't do this through a config profile since we will not be managing the devices once the programs are installed (I don't want the users to have to manually remove the profile either).

I also tried using composer but found that after I created my pkg file, but foudn the pkg file was 3x the size of the original installer.

What's the best way to go about doing this? I found I can run this: defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck Manual to set updates to manual on the user's profile, which should be sufficient enough for what we are trying to accomplish, but not quite sure which command to run to enable auto updates every month vs day.

[talkingmoose]

The Microsoft AutoUpdate app has no interface for controlling how frequently to check for updates. It's possible only with a configuration profile or you'll need to edit each user's plist setting using something like:

/usr/bin/defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 UpdateCheckFrequency -int 43200

30 days = 43,200 minutes. Keep in mind that without using a configuration profile, students can change that value or disable updates altogether. Also, if a check occurs and a student declines an update, he or she won't receive another notification for another 30 days.

What's the department's rationale for setting the check to every 30 days? Do they want to keep Office up-to-date or not?

[skywada]

Got it, thanks for your advice!

The main concern is that if students were to check in daily for updates, and if there is a major update, it would bog down the network.

The laptops would be considered BYOD after we push O365, and knowing that we can't control for updates past that point, setting monthly check ins seemed like the next best thing, to at least stagger updates.