Microsoft Office 365: You don't need 27 floppies, but there is desktop friction Microsoft would like us to think of Office 365, its hosted email and collaboration service, as “cloud”. And it is in many ways; you can even get all your email and OneDrive-stored documents direct from a web browser. The truth though is that Microsoft has been careful not to disrupt its desktop Office software too much. Most …
> No you don't. Just install it and it will remove / update the old version automatically.
Sorry, doesn't work in this case. I believe the problem is that the plan change meant a downgrade to a version of Office without Access and probably other differences. Anyway, the documented migration specifies that you must remove Office from Control Panel.
"No you don't. Just install it and it will remove / update the old version automatically."
You are kidding right? Office will happily install in a trully mind boggling array of FAIL. It will happily install 3 different versions of its self. Plus the the flogware shortcut welded to the PC. I've seen poor IT techs with 32bit and 64bit and a different build number of publisher all on the same machine. None would work or uninstall. And that was with out help from 365.
MS has a specail "Office Nuke" app for fixing really &$%$%&$ up installs. Though by this time it's usually too late. Bury the PC in a disued mine shaft interstate. Sell the customer a new one. Then check the tech into a new padded office to slowly wheen him off hold music and back onto solids.
Rum may also help at this point...
One of the issues with having Office 365 is that you don't get Ace installed on your PC - see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2874601
Obviously a PITA if you want to use Ace. Even more if you write software which uses Ace (not for very much - just for import and export) and have to think of how to document this given Microsoft's opaque documentation on when you get Ace and when you don't.
"One of the issues with having Office 365 is that you don't get Ace installed on your PC"
No, the issue is that the Office 365 client install by default runs in a virtualised container (what they refer to as Click-To-Run). Think like Docker if you are from an Open Source background, but this is based on something called App-V (originally SoftGrid) which is a rather more mature and sophisticated solution (for instance it has install on demand and application streaming technology - so it can start running before installation has completed!) and is far more widely adopted - although you might not be aware of it!
Hence you need to understand and manage connectivity to applications outside of that CTR container accordingly. You do not have to install Office 365 as a CTR app if you don't want to - you can still install it using an MSI option.
Yes, obviously, I was simplifying. This is on user's computers, not mine - therefore our documentation has to include exactly the sort of irksome wibble that you describe above and the customers have to understand it (or more likely CBA because in an organisation of thousands of users, only a handful need ACE)
its fucking appalling.
go and buy a single license. you have to set up an ms account.
so you do that.
then you buy another 5 licenses for the same client.
there is NO WAY of telling which install is on which machine, except, and this comes straight from ms, by the date (not the time, the date) of install which is on the portal next to the install. so if one of them gets problems and you have to reinstall, you guess which one it is. if you get the wrong one, you then have 2 problems, because the one you just accidentally removed now will flash up activation warnings on the pc that it was on. so then you have to figure out which one that is, reinstate it, etc etc.
so you either set up different ms accounts for every single pc with 1 license in each, or install 1 per day.
fucking bravo MS, really clever. you fucking dicks.
i mean, how fucking difficult is it to put the machine name or mac address or something in the fucking portal next to the install?
as for the streamed install, this is also bullshit. what i want is an msi. then i dont have to download fucking tonnes of data every time i want to install office. if im installing it on 10 machines, i have to download the whole thing 10 times.
it also says "ive finished installing". then about a day later you will get a call from someone because office isnt responding, and they havent noticed the "office is just downloading and installing a component" . so it didnt do a proper install in the first place.
jesus christ, its hard enough as it is without a domain, why are they making it harder?
if anyone has any more up to date news (becuase i have been installing 2010 ever since the nightmare i had) on how to deal with multiple 2013 / 2016 / 365 installs, i would love to hear it.
dont get me strated on the "unable to manually configure exchange accounts in 2016". if you dont have an autoconfigure record in your customers dns, you have to go and amend the hosts file, which can also be fun with hosted exchange. just let me enter the details if i need to thankyou very much.
Autodiscover has been the de facto configuration method for an Outlook profile for 3 years now, and has been around for almost 10 years. It's much easier for the user to create an Outlook profile (as long as you've configured autod correctly, and for Office 365 its a simple case of 1 DNS record).
You can deploy Office from a network share/USB drive also using the Click-to-run deployment tool, this is my standard deployment method on all my customers sites. So you don't need to be downloading the files every time and you also don't need an MSI. You can even choose which components to install, which update cycle you want to be on, and whether its silent or not.
On multiple installs when you buy the standalone Office 2016 I completely agree, its an absolute nightmare. Buy the Office 365 version instead and you will have a much better experience as you get the software linked to an Office 365 user, with a lovely option to activate/deactivate based on workstation name.
autoconfigure is great if it works.
if you have say a customer that has a vitrual machine sat on a vps which hosts his site and domain and the guy who set it up has disappeared, and the customer is trying to use your hosted exchange, it can be a pain in the arse. (although doable, i know)
i just dont see the logic in removing the manual config option. it makes no sense. use this server with these parameters. just do what i am telling you. dont go off and tell me that it doesnt work,. it will work if you use these parameters you bastard thing. and it will take me about 2 minutes instead of lots of dicking around.
the problem with using 365 - if your customer starts with one single license, or if they dont want to rent it, they want to buy it.
i'll look into the click to run deployment, i didnt know about that, so thanks!
If I'm not mistaken, the portal version gets continuously updated.
If you have a share, after installing [and depending on how old] you may need to download a few hundred MB or more to update after. Early on, there was 1.2GB to download of Office 2013 updates for just a month.
There are three Office versions mention in that title. I can't speak for Office 365, I don't use it, but for 2013 and 2016 installed online using a medialess pack, the Microsoft account shows date, version, purchase type (I assume, it shows "prepaid card" on all mine), and cost (I assume, it shows £0.00 on all mine, presumably if you bought from Microsoft directly rather than a retailer, it would show what you paid). It does not show what PCs the purchases were installed/activated on as far as I can see. Not an issue for me, but the OP's not lying.
no , im not lying!
A man and his pet giraffe walk into a bar and start drinking. As the night goes on, they get drunk, and the giraffe finally passes out. The man decides to go home.
As he's leaving, the man is approached by the barkeeper who says, "Hey, you're not gonna leave that lyin' here, are ya?"
"Hmph," says the man. "That's not a lion -- it's a giraffe."
So basically it is
1) A dogs breakfast
followed by
2) MS couldn't organise a piss up in a Brewery even if Lookout Calendar worked.
Only if you have been to the Microsoft school of industrial magic can you get it even 50% working.
Oh, and Lookout/365 (windows 7) keeps throwing .Net V4.0 errors. Apparently this can be fixed by installing one of those patches that sends everything you do back to MS Central.
Oh and don't forget to get some extra CALS just in case. You never know when FAST will come calling.
I install a shed load of single Office 201x and I do is make a one-time-use outlook account which i then write onto the card along with the password. It adds maybe 10 minutes to the installation, and granted, it doesn't scale well, but it's worked for me in the past.
@psychonaut - what you wrote is EXACTLY my feelings on the matter. I even had to check if I hadn't written your comment!
Having to suffer Microsoft's rather bad software is total friction the whole time. Nothing they do works first time, properly. Like the other day when we couldn't install an Office 2016 using their Edge "browser". It just didn't work. We had to use Chrome. How crappy is that? Like everything Psychonaut wrote above. Why? This company surely has the resources to make this work. Why can't I use the Outlook 2013 download from our exchange host on a machine with an Office 2013 trial on it? Why doesn't IMAP work properly in Outlook?
If more people moved over to Google Drive/Docs the world would be a simpler place!
I don't get this at all. I've been on O365 Small Business for a smidge over a year, 3 seats, and been through several different users and machines in that time.
Lync installed with office, so I didn't run into that issue, it was just there.
As for the not knowing which machines are using which licenses, if you go to My Account | Installation Status it will tell you which machines have it installed, with the OS and machine name too.
What I will agree with is how complicated the licensing is, especially if you go with a third party (I wanted Project, but my third party doesn't offer it as an option and I can't get it added to the subscription by MS either...)
no worries, my fault, i did put 365 in the title of my post - i havent gone down that route cos when i say to customers yes you can pay ms this much per year, or, buy this once and it will last probably 5 years plus, (they can pry 2010 out of my cold dead hands...etc etc) they say....but if i rent it i could have bought it outright for the same cost of the first 18 months or so.
so i quietly say, hating myself, but hey, you get to "upgrade" to the new versions when they come out.
they dont want new versions. they dont want change. they want things to work the way they worked yesterday so they can get on and earn some money with what they do, and for the button they know to push when they do x to be in the same place.
no brainer for them really.
so yes, it probably is a deliberate decision by ms to make it as hard as possible to manage non 365 stuff. as noted above (and the conclusion i came to before i found discount 2010 software) you can make a seperate email account for ea\ch install (which is what i do now if the customer really wants it)
theres absolutely no forgiveness for the no manual config of exchange accounts in outlook 2016 though
Got it,now I understand! I've only installed one standalone copy of 2015, as besides myself I've yet to find anyone who's moved past 2013, which was easy! Installing 2015 on the other hand was a PITA.
So I feel your pain. I'm a big fan of 365 if you're using it as a total solution (bunging your exchange/onedrive etc in with it too). If you're not though, there's no point as you're just making your life difficult.
cheers!
as for the "one big solution" thing...im not a fan of the big boys, one of the last people i would trust to run an exchange server with my data on it would be microsoft...well, ok, maybe BT via microsoft....
who do you call when it goes titsup??
i use a local hosting company (host100) - they are always on hand immediately if there are any issues, or you need something non standard doing.
Of course; Microsoft really wants you to buy into their annual subscription so that you can use Office both offline an online and it's soo easy (marketing talk no doubt). And to that end they'll even go as far as to place the offline purchases (hardcopies?) of Office at the back of the (sometimes electronic) shelves and focus their attention on 365. Because that means you'll be paying them a small fee every month.
And although that small fee sounds nice: many smaller things combined can make one bigger thing. That is the whole gameplan. Heck, you see this business model all over the place: even Visual Studio now favors their subscription model over the "hard copy". Don't believe me? Check out the 2015 product editions overview. I want professional, but I don't want a subscription. Now what? (trust me: it is doable, but simply more burried away).
But I still think they're playing it fair. First the case of Visual Studio: did you see that first link? "Visual Studio Community" => Free (quote: "Visual Studio Community is free for individual developers, open source projects, academic research, training, education, and small professional teams."). Just a comment: hopefully you, dear reader, are smart enough to realize that "open source" does not equate to "free software" per definition. Just saying. And on top of that: I think there are dozens of people who ignore the Community edition because "It's free so probably not as good as professional". Bzzzt.
Enough offtopicness: back to Office. Even here do you see the fairness of the business model. Because if you get the 'offline product' (which I'd refer to as a normal Office installation) then you still get access to the online counterparts if you want. I am running Office 2010 (waaay outdated, right?) and I can still upload Word documents onto OneDrive, give certain people access to said documents and we can even group-edit. Not only am I using an ancient Office version, I'm not even using 365!
And the same applies to the current Office software. Some of my friends do enjoy the modern interface better and yeah... No worries.
So although I do agree that Microsoft is a big vague about some things I still think they're playing a fair game.
It works (as well as any version of Office), it doesn't nag about licensing if I move it to a new PC and I don't have to pay it rent.
While it might well be an advantage to businesses to have a subscription model for their IT services (assuming that the benefit of being able to plan expenditure isn't undermined by continual creative changes to pricing structures), I really can't see how this is going to help the personal and SOHO user. Fine if you're earning a reasonable income and you're getting real value from your subscription. But if you're retired or have an unpredictable income, being able to rely on the availability of software you purchased when you had the money to do it is important.
It's all part of a trend towards a centralisation of capital - if you rent your books and movies rather than buy them, rent your software and, of course, increasingly, rent your home you simply become the modern equivalent of a serf.
"anything prior to outlook 2003 has hideous issues on 7 or later."
Outlook prior to 2003 had a really nasty 2GB PST file size limit, and after you reached the limit Outlook would happily let the file grow and corrupt it at the same time. The old PST file also didn't display messages with Unicode contenty properly or at all. (little hazy after all these years)
The reason why older Outlooks don't play nice is because they're the only Office components that integrate with the OS, as a MAPI client and it's also using the Windows Credential manager for saving email account passwords and the like. I think the latter one is a problem, I remember not being able to save passwords with OL2000 under Win7.
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