How to customise & Deploy Microsoft 365 Apps

this time around it's all about deploying and customizing office 365 software for your users in microsoft 365 and there's a few secrets let's take a look hi everyone andy malone microsoft mvp and microsoft certified trainer welcome back to the channel this time around it's the turn of deploying and customizing office professional plus which course comes part of microsoft 365. in the past it was a very laborious process which involved lots of text files and a lot of manual effort but nowadays it's a cinch and just how does it work and what are the tools that are involved well you've come to the right place just to remember if you like what you see go ahead click on that subscribe button ring that bell and you won't miss a thing anyway on with the demo and as always i love your feedback and your questions pop them down below and i will definitely get to them okay so let's go and enjoy so to deploy microsoft office professional plus we're going to kick off in a couple of places first of all i'm in the admin center in microsoft 365 and the obvious places to start is in endpoint manager so i'm going to flip over into endpoint manager here and in one of my previous videos i talked about assigning devices adding devices adding apps and so on but the one thing that we didn't talk about was what if you want to have a custom version of office pro plus so the way that we do that is we come down to the apps blade here in the admin center now typically deploying all the different apps you can deploy them by the different platforms and and so on the other things that we can do is you can also do protection policies and configuration policies let's say for example if you purchased an app from an app store um what i want to show you here is a couple of things well first of all uh policies for office apps so if you want to have a custom configuration for your users within your tenant so what we can do in here is i'm just going to click on create and i'm going to call this my sales app policy okay so this is my sales app policy i can put in a description here and then it says okay what type of policy is it going to be um is it going to be a configuration applies to users or is it going to be a configuration that applies to users that access documents anonymously so this is for example if you want to if you've got guests for example so the purpose of this i'm going to go ahead and click on applies to users now which users so is it a particular group or a particular team so again i said that this is a sales policy so i'm going to go ahead and assign the sales team now i can then click on configure policy so the next thing then is okay am i ready to actually create this policy now i gotta be honest we have many different policies and if you're from if you're familiar with on-site technologies like group policy in active directory then you'll be familiar with the group policy template so microsoft office pro plus and this is very much uh the same so we have lots of different settings here so a common one might be for example do you want the the cache cleared so when the you the cache is obviously what the files that the user's been working on so if the user wants those cleared you can choose whether you want to enable or you want to disable that so i'm going to go ahead for the purpose of this demo and i'm going to say yes i want that enabled now again if you're using older versions so that's pretty old um you know do you want to do custom configurations for that um what you can also do is you can block all unmanaged add-ins this is a good security uh idea so um you don't want your users uh downloading little add-ins for software because in many cases they can do more harm than good so i'm going to go ahead and add that now of course all these settings what they do is they write it into the user's registry settings on their windows 10 machines by the way so other options you've got things like you can allow custom templates you can set a default database folder if you're working on a database and you can choose things like default file formats for products like access here so again it depends really on the the version of the product that you're working on here so this particular template here as you can see is for microsoft access so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to go and create that policy now for my sales users so if my users are using for example a template then that is absolutely perfect and that configures it there so that just takes a moment okay and you can see that that sales app policy has now been created and it's configured and it's healthy so that's the first thing and of course i can go in and i can create other policies for different apps as well so you can have different you know one for excel or powerpoint or things like that so that's the first place you can go into the endpoint manager to uh tool and you can manage the apps the policies for office apps here so is that the full story not entirely so i'm going to come out of endpoint manager and of course here we have the various admin centers for 365. security compliance endpoint manager and so on but if you come down to the very bottom these are all the admin centers there's a lot more here than meets the eye and i'm going to go to this one this is the office configurations admin center and this adds a whole bunch of new features and some of these are actually in preview so you can create office policies here and the key thing is that these are this is cloud-based policy management for your microsoft office subscriptions so you can basically configure all the microsoft 365 apps here so you don't need to do this through intune you can do this here and the other thing that you can also look at here is the security policy advisor so the first place i'm going to go is again i'm going to go to a servicing profile this is a new feature that's coming into 365. now to be honest i haven't created anything here yet so i can't really do anything with that but i am going to come down to the customization tool and in here you've got device configuration policy management and again anything that's what's new so if i go into device configuration this is my office configuration or sorry office customization tool i should say so the first thing that i'm going to do is um i'm going to go ahead is i created one earlier so i'm going to just remove that just so that we're nice and clean to start with all right so first up i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to create so it says here okay this and you can see it's creating an xml so an a configuration.xml file for me now in the past you would have typically had to do this through a text file okay the office deployment toolkit so i'm going to call this my demo configuration dot xml all right so that's what i'm going to call it now is this for a 32-bit os or is it for a 64-bit os and which products do you want to add in so is it for the uh which microsoft product licenses it now do remember that you've got office enterprise and business so this really depends on the sku that you're on so office enterprise is the one i'm going to use for my team do you want to add in any additional products so again you can bring in any additional products here so i'm going to say none okay bearing in mind you need to have the licenses for those um do you want vizio do you want microsoft project do you want any additional products or am i just configuring the apps for enterprise all right so other things you might want to bring in a language pack so again if you're in a college or a university or something like that you may have a need for different languages um you can also if you're using access you can bring in the microsoft access runtime as well so again for the purpose of this demo i'm just going to leave that one blank okay so coming down again where you see the blue lines here this just means it's going to take you through to docs.microsoft.com now in terms of the update channel so microsoft have what we call update rings so rather than updating everybody at the same time you can decide hey i want to do a current channel we have monthly semi-annual so every six months and then semi-annual targeted to targeted users so really the difference between the difference is that um for example updates uh come in two flavors critical updates come out really every 30 days they need to it's a maximum of 30 days um that you've got to install them whereas kind of feature updates so you know things that are not so important but they're nice to have well you can say okay these are going to go out let's say up to every six months all right and so if you've got a company with thousands and thousands of users then that gives you the time to deploy these here um select the version that you want to install so again you can always just choose the latest version or the last version so i'm just going to choose the latest version here now do you want to turn apps on or off or do you want to ensure them that they're actually displayed for your users so onedrive of course the old name for onedrive was groov if any of you remember that so that's off by default we're talking about the app of course so users again that might be for a security reason that you don't want the users downloading the app so you just want them to access it through the web we've got sharepoint we've got onedrive we've got outlook publisher word skype for business which is teams of course and again it shows you both versions so if you're just on teams then you can always go ahead and disable that option there um the background service for microsoft search um again do you want to have that on um now down here so again i can just come back and i will just uh collapse this option here um so um you can set well i can will i collapse this option yeah so i'm just going to collapse this back uh next thing then is language so if you had chosen a language back you can choose which language uh that you're you're going for here so again english uk us whatever so for the purpose of this demo i'll just choose english us um you can also have additional languages too so for example if you're teaching in a college or a university you might want to add in multiple languages and then depending on the user's profile they can obviously go in and choose that um so that's fine again i won't bother with that so the next thing i'll just collapse that down so the next thing then is installation so where do you want to deploy office from so the office content delivery network so that's microsoft 365 or do you want to download a copy of office and actually share it on your local network for the purpose of this demo i'll use the cdn okay then we've got the option here you can also this is very cool actually so if you're using endpoint manager you can use the endpoint configuration manager if you want to so endpoint configuration manager by the way is the on-premises version of this tool so endpoint manager is the cloud version and endpoint configuration manager is the new name for system center conflict manager um i won't bother with that so i'm just going to say content delivery network um show the installation to the user or if you don't show the installation then it will be silent it will just run in the background um then you can say okay so once you've done that how do you want to update an upgrade so every application has a life cycle a beginning a middle and an end so how do you want to deal with this um so things like dealing with updates do you want to automatically check update so microsoft of course have its own update service which is hosted online um you can also if you are working with let's say on premises applications these typically typically come in the format of msi microsoft installer packages so in this case what you what it's saying here is rather than using the on-premises versions i'm going to go ahead and uninstall these tools all right because these tools might not be supported still within what we're doing all right so you do have the options as i say to uninstall those um licensing and activation so automatically accept the euler so the user euler means the end user license agreement i'm sure you've seen it when you install a piece of software it will ask you do you wish to accept the license um so i'm just going to say yes automatically accept it so this will just run through completely silently without any user interaction um in the general tab again provide your organization's name so i'll call mine a datum um and i'll call it my a datum corp okay so i can put a little description in and i'll click on next and there we go so now i can say are there any other preferences that i want to put in so any other and this looks somewhat similar to the endpoint option that i showed you earlier so in here this is where you can now restrict the various settings and when the user installs these settings it will actually put these into the user's registry on the user's computer all right and it will enforce those restrictions so you see what i mean initially you think it's actually really simple and it actually is but there's a lot of settings and i do recommend by the way with the application preferences that you obviously maybe have a test environment just to test these okay so you can literally restrict anything and everything you can choose where the default files are stored um you can choose um for example things like spell checking whether you want the spell checking on um you know you can choose default formats and layouts and things like that so those are the application preferences and again in the modern world or in the older world rather on premises we'd have we would have called these group policy settings so there we have it the office customization tool and endpoint manager and look at this it's gone ahead and it's now produced that configuration xml file for me so now i just click on done and now i that's it i'm done so i can i can now select this and i can just go ahead and download that xml file so now when i download it it says okay what do i want to do do i want to keep the current file format do i want to choose office xml and open format so off it will go i'll save it and let me just download this i will open this file so i'll just open up the file here and you will see it now typically an xml file you would just open it up with a text file all right so here is my uh configuration xml um i am just going to open this up with microsoft word okay sorry i tell you what yeah it's looking for a tech it's looking for a text editor right but you can see here look this is it it's created this unattend text file here look at that that is just awesome isn't it so in the old versions of the product that was very much a manual process okay so i'm going to go into settings here and in settings i'm going into services and i'm scrolling right down to the bottom and we have this new feature what's new in microsoft office so what you can do here is you can manage which office features appear in what's new and this is obviously when a user let's say opens up microsoft word or excel it shows them their the updated features so you've also got access to the same feature here as well that's that will just take you to the same screen as you can see so the other features that we have here you have got the app health so any apps that you've deployed will give you a nice update of the health so if there's any issues with those updates you can find them then and you've also got things like one drive sync so if you are using the sync tool it will give you a nice kind of helicopter overview of if of your uh sink so if you've got any kind of anomalies in there that would be quite useful again you've also got the service health and also another feature if you're using devices and endpoint manager this is a great place to see your inventory um so again it will go off and it will sprawl throughout your organization and it will build a list of all the apps and the channels and the devices that you have in your organization now again for this demo you can see i don't have very much so there we go a quick look at some of the software configuration and customization settings so there you have it deploying and customizing microsoft with the new customization tools which come part at the office 365 admin center it's amazing how many people don't know it's even there i really hope you've enjoyed this session and as always go ahead click on that subscribe button ring the bell and you won't miss future postings and of course i always listen to your questions and feedback so thank you so much and i'll see you next time you stay safe thanks for dropping by hope you enjoyed the video go ahead and click on the subscribe button and ring that bell and you won't miss a thing see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andy Malone

Views: 433

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft 365 Deployment, Configuring Microsoft 365, MVPBuzz, Andy Malone

Id: h34tmK0ux44

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021