Installing Office 365 Software on RDP Server
Recently Microsoft have changed the licensing structure of Office 365, and you are now (under certain licenses) able to install Office 2013 Pro Plus on your TS server. Its not a straightforward clicky the button and install, rather you’ll need a couple of batch files, some changes to the configuration file, and a bit of patience.
- First thing you’ll need is the Office Deployment Tool
- Copy this to a location with plenty of space (about 1.2 GB), running it should extract out the setup.exe file and a configuration file.
- Create a share to that location
- Edit the configuration file to look something like this (where the servername is the name of the server your on, and sharename is the share created above.
<Configuration>
<Add SourcePath=”\\servername\sharename\” OfficeClientEdition=”32″ >
<Product ID=”O365ProPlusRetail”>
<Language ID=”en-us” />
</Product>
</Add> <!– <Updates Enabled=”TRUE” UpdatePath=”default\” /> –>
<Display Level=”None” AcceptEULA=”TRUE” />
<Logging Name=”OfficeSetup.txt” Path=”%temp%” />
<Property Name=”SharedComputerLicensing” Value=”1″ />
</Configuration>
The “SharedComputerLicensing” is the key section, by setting that section we can install and run Office 2013 Pro Plus on the RDP machine and each user will need to activate using their account.
- Next we need a couple of Batch files, one to download the files for a local setup, the second to run the installation
\\servername\sharename\setup.exe /download \\servername\sharename\configuration.xml
\\servername\sharename\setup.exe /configure \\servername\sharename\configuration.xml
- Run both of these in order, and your Office 2013 Pro Plus will be installed.
- Each user will be asked to activate the first time they use the RDP server.
