Deploying Microsoft 365 office apps to Windows devices

This article explains how you can deploy Microsoft 365 applications to your Windows 10 and 11 devices using GoTo Resolve MDM and Microsoft's Office Deployment Tool (ODT).

What is the Microsoft Office Deployment Tool?

The Office Deployment Tool is a utility that can be used to download, configure and install Microsoft 365 office applications on Windows computers. With the ODT, you can define which products and language versions are installed, and how those products should be updated.

Deployment steps

Before you begin: Before starting to deploy Microsoft 365 apps, please check the following prerequisites and do the necessary preparations.

Administrator or Editor level user access on your GoTo Resolve MDM site.
Make sure your users have Office 365 (or Microsoft 365) accounts and licenses to use Microsoft 365 Apps.
Check the installed operating system versions and architectures (32-bit or 64-bit) of your Windows devices.
Check the required language versions for your users.
Make sure that your Windows devices meet the system requirements for installing Microsoft 365 apps (Windows 10 or 11, 4GB of disk space)

Start by downloading the Office Deployment Tool.
Run the self-extracting executable file that you downloaded. It contains the ODT tool (setup.exe) and sample configuration files.
Prepare the configuration file(s). In a configuration file, you can choose which language versions of the apps will be installed on your devices and how the applications will be updated. See Microsoft's documentation for more about the ODT configuration options.
Compress the ODT tool (setup.exe) with a configuration file into a zip file. In this example, we use the configuration-Office365-x64.xml file. Make sure that there is no folder structure within the zip package, just the needed files.
Go to the Management > Applications page on GoTo Resolve MDM and choose Add > Windows application > Advanced (file upload). Upload the created zip file.

The layout of the screen may look different in the product.
Give the application a name and description.
Tick the Extract checkbox and enter the command-line command that will be used to execute the ODT tool. Make sure that you give the correct configuration file name as a parameter for the installation.

Note: An example command is setup.exe /configure configuration-Office365-x64.xml
Fill in the amount of required free disk space, which is about 4000 MBs for the Microsoft 365 Apps.

The layout of the screen may look different in the product.
Click Create. After this, you are ready to deploy Microsoft 365 Apps to compatible Windows 10 and 11 devices using GoTo Resolve MDM.

The layout of the screen may look different in the product.
You can follow the deployment status from the Device page's Action log. The installation may take a while because the device(s) will download the needed files before the installation.

The layout of the screen may look different in the product.

Results: If you want to automate the deployment of Microsoft 365 office apps, check How to create a business policy article.

Exclude specific apps from deployment

If you want, it is also possible to exclude selected applications or language versions from the Microsoft 365 deployment. For instance, with the following configuration, the deployment would install all Microsoft 365 apps except Publisher.

How to exclude Microsoft 365 apps or language versions from deployment

The layout of the screen may look different in the product.

Article last updated: 12 October, 2022

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