Office 365 Inventory/Smart Group

[cshepp11]

Trying to get an idea here of how people are keeping inventory of machines with O365 as opposed to machines with 2011. I am currently in the stage of converting O2011 users to O365 by simply deleting the /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensing.plist and having the user relaunch an Office product and sign in to O365 with creds.

How would I go about creating a report that shows machines with O365 installed (activated) vs. machines that do not have Office installed at all. Ultimately, I'd like for this to be a smart group so that we can take inventory of the number of users/machines that have O365 activated.

-Chris

[jacobschultz]

You could create a Smart Group with the Criteria of "Application Title".

[cshepp11]

Jacob,
Not sure that would work as Office 365 is really just Office 2011. The only thing that changes is the licensing model.

[szhang]

bump, I like to figure this out as well.

[luisgiraldo]

I *think* there is an Office 365 service daemon that runs when a user has activated Office with 365, but I'm not 100% certain if it runs all the time anyways even for serial-activated copies.

[cshepp11]

@luisgiraldo - I believe that daemon has been there since Service pack 3. I just cross referenced a machine that only had Office 2011 14.3 and Office365Service was there. Thanks for the reply. I have been testing some custom extension attributes, I might be on to something. If I am successful, I will share my process.

Chris

[#7]

I believe the latest version of Outlook for 365 is 15.3; the most recent version for 2011 is still 14.4.2.

I'm being migrated this weekend (ugh) and will know more next week.

[nessts]

you can use 14.4.7 which is the most current Outlook in the 14.x series or you can get the outlook 15.3 client, which is just the same tool with the new stupid flat look, color scheme, new icon, and a different version number from what i saw playing with it yesterday. I have heard better feature parity, but I could not find one setting that looked any different between the two in my quick look at it. Not sure why you would change.

[cshepp11]

Ok Guys, I think I may have figured this out. I have created both a Smart Group and an Inventory Report in Casper 9.63 to check if O365 is activated on machines that have Office installed.

First, I created an extension attribute that checks to see if the com.microsoft.office.licensing.plist exists.

Display Name: Check for Office 2011 license file
Data Type: string
Inventory Display: Extension Attribute
Input Type: Script

Script:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -f "/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensing.plist" ]; then
    echo "<result>Yes</result>"
else
    echo "<result>No</result>"
fi

Next I created a smart group called Has O365 Activated

Criteria is set to:
Application Title is Microsoft Word.app and Check for Office 2011 license file is no

Machines should start reporting into the smart group once they check in. Let me know if this works for you or if there are tweaks that could help this process.

Thanks,
Chris

[ernstcs]

This isn't the trick I'm afraid. Our Enterprise versions of Office 2011, not O365, have a license file as well. My machine has one and I haven't installed O365 yet. I'm looking a bit myself to see if I can find a difference between them from another box that does have it.

[cshepp11]

@ernstcs,

Exactly, O365 does not have that file, it is deleted.

[ernstcs]

@csheppard

First, I misunderstood. That being said I still don't think it's the best test, but certainly an option. If that file is leftover for whatever reason you're going to get inaccurate results. That's all.

Our test case here is somewhat unusual since it was another admin's box and he downloaded and installed the suite by hand, so that file is left over. If I know this particular file is something I can eliminate, like it sounds like you're doing, it would be scripted to be deleted as part of the policy to deploy the new suite. I won't necessarily have the luxury here to prevent users from downloading their own copies though I'm guessing once their O365 account is enabled.

We're just starting to look at all of this so perhaps I'll just sit back and watch the thread progress and shut up. =D

[cshepp11]

@ernstcs

We already had O2011 deployed to all machines in our environment. We "deployed" O365 by sending out a policy that deleted the said file. Once an Office product (Word, Excel) was opened after the deletion of the file, the user then logged in with their 0365 credentials.

If you go to portal.office.com and download and install the Office version, the "Getting Started with Office" screen appears, you have the option to log in with O365 account, doing this will not create the plist file. If you didn't sign in, you would have to enter 2011 license key, this would create the file.

This process can work on any machine that is running Office 2011 14.3 or higher.

[JamfMyMac]

any update?