Office for Mac MAU Update Deadline

[chrisgavexperia]

The newly released Office for Mac MAU (4.13) shows in its release notes that a new feature has been added where you can set a deadline.

"MAU Update Deadline: Mac Admins can now set a deadline within MAU to enforce updates across their Mac users."

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/release-history-microsoft-autoupdate

But nowhere in these notes does it actually say how to use it, has anyone got any ideas?

There aren't any new commands listed in ./msupdate

[hdsreid]

i see this in my com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist file now:

"UpdateDeadline.DaysBeforeForcedQuit" = 0;
"UpdateDeadline.StartAutomaticUpdates" = 0;

I imagine these would be the keys to change

[talkingmoose]

If you haven’t yet, sign up for MacAdmins Slack at http://macadmins.org and join the #microsoft-autoupdate channel. Diksha Mehta should be posting more about this new feature there.

[chrisgavexperia]

Many thanks you guys!

[Kallendal]

Nice!

[chrisgavexperia]

I'm following along in the MacAdmins slack and waiting for the actual usage of this. I'd assume that DaysBeforeForcedQuit is a number of days before the user is nicely prompted to update before it goes ahead and closes the app and does it for them. That is just an assumption, of course. So if I set a value of 30, they'll have 30 days of being pestered, but what starts the clock ticking? the date of the actual release of the update, or the first day that the Mac gets notified?

I'm unclear of what the second value "StartAutomaticUpdates" is for. Is that a way to defer automatic updates? Leaving that as zero prompts as soon as updates become available and changing that to 10 gives the user 10 days before they are prompted? I'd need to test to be sure, I wish Microsoft would just produce some documentation on this.

[Captainamerica]

The documentation is found here
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/deployoffice/mac/mau-deadline

I tried to convert it to a configuration profile like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<key>UpdateDeadline.ApplicationsForcedUpdateSchedule</key>
<dict>
  <key>/Applications/Microsoft Word.app</key>
  <dict>
    <key>Application ID</key>
    <string>MSWD2019</string>
    <key>ForcedUpdateDate</key>
    <date>2019-07-29T11:49:20Z</date>
    <key>ForcedUpdateVersion</key>
    <string>16.27.19071500</string>
  </dict>
  <key>/Applications/Microsoft Outlook.app</key>
  <dict>
    <key>Application ID</key>
    <string>OPIM2019</string>
    <key>ForcedUpdateDate</key>
    <date>2019-07-29T11:49:20Z</date>
    <key>ForcedUpdateVersion</key>
    <string>16.27.19071500</string>
  </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

But nothing happens for some reason. Must it be created a different way?

[jwojda]

the doc says it's possible to apply to all apps registered with MAU, but doens't say how to actually do so.

All Microsoft applications that are updated by MAU. For example, Skype for Business, Remote Desktop, and Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). The default is for the deadline to apply to all applications that receive updates from MAU.

Does that mean I just add this to an empty plist?

<key>UpdateDeadline.DaysBeforeForcedQuit</key>
   <integer>10</integer>