Introduction:
Office 365 ProPlus is one of the subscription service plans in the new Office. It is productivity software (including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, Skype for Business) that is installed on your desktop or laptop computer. Office 365 ProPlus is a user-based service that allows people to access Office experiences on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on their mobile devices. Traditional Office installations were tied to the computers they were installed on.
Few months ago ,we have started rolling out office 365 proplus (cloud version) using Configmgr Current Branch. I have created application using powershell app deployment toolkit in combination with offscrub scripts from Microsoft. Using these 2 scripts,you can fully automate the installation office 365 proplus by removing the old versions (2007,2010,2013 and 2016 MSI based ) of office and install cloud version. I will write blog post on how to use these 2 scripts and create application to install proplus and what are the GPO settings you need to consider for this proplus for performance issues,patching mechanism etc.
Problem:
Coming to this blog post, we have mixed environment which includes laptops ,desktops and VDI (virtual desktop infra) machines. So proplus installed on all these machines using SCCM .Installation went smooth and users started using the office for their day to work.
All looks good from user point of view but when it comes to managing this office proplus with updates ,you need to understand how it works and what are the settings applied on the on PC for proplus.
After the proplus installed on many computers, we started noticing the office 365 update section in SCCM (software library –office 365 client management--office 365 updates ) for patching and found that, some of the clients are reporting update status but majority of them are reporting unknown as shown below.
By the way ,we are going with semi-annual channel as we do not want to update proplus every month hence we look at semi-annual channel updates only for deployment.
Solution:
After looking at the unknown status with bigger count ,i started looking at clients chassis type as some of them are working good but majority are not. This is because ,we have used same package for proplus and and one GPO with proplus settings and one client agent settings.
When am using one configuration for all ,why there is difference in update scan status for office 365 client updates ?
Use the default report Home > ConfigMgr_Sitecode > Software Updates - A Compliance > Compliance 6 - Specific software update states (secondary) to know the unknown clients.
After reviewing the unknown client, found that,majority of the clients are VDI hence there is something on VDI machines.
Got one VDI assigned on my name so i can troubleshooting to find the root cause.
Following are the checklist perform on the VDI that is having issue:
1. Check if SCCM client is working good and healthy .How do you say it is healthy ? Check in SCCM console of policy request and its inventory .
2.Is the client receiving policies and what is the software updates status on this PC ? look at its last software update scan and also last patching status. If this is working fine then for sure ,something wrong with office 365 proplus application how it was installed or the configurations applied on VDI’s.
3. Verified in SCCM that ,client agent settings are configured correctly with ‘Enable management of the office 365 client agent’ to ‘Yes’ in software update section .This setting can also be enabled through GPO. This is one of the requirement as SCCM Client check Office COM interface to be enabled as it act as communication between office and Configmgr. This functionality must be turn ON.You can check the registry key on client PC for officemgmtcom (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\common\officeupdate)
After all the above checklist, i could not find anything wrong .Everything seems to be good.
While am troubleshooting on this ,found a Microsoft article referring to Troubleshooting Office 365 ProPlus https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2017/03/23/troubleshooting-office-365-proplus-patching-through-system-center-configuration-manager/
After reading the article,found that, there is one setting that i need to verify which i mentioned in the checklist above 3) Verify COM interface is registered or not .As we have enabled this through GPO and also using SCCM Client agent settings ,COM interface should be registered (officemgmtcom) . So how to verify if COM interface registered or not ?
You can do this by verifying existence of following registry key on the client. This registry is same for proplus on each PC.
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B7F1785F-D69B-46F1-92FC-D2DE9C994F13}\InProcServer32]
@=”C:\\Program Files\\Common Files\\Microsoft Shared\\ClickToRun\\OfficeC2RCom.dll”
On the problem client ,i could not find this registry key ({B7F1785F-D69B-46F1-92FC-D2DE9C994F13})
As per the technet blog ,i suspect AV (antivirus ) on the client is blocking com interface , hence involved AV Team but there is nothing after troubleshooting and also tried disabling the AV on the client then start ,stop the Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service service.
Issue did not resolve even after AV disable .What could go wrong ?
we talk few times about COM interface and must be registered for this process hence i started looking at component services that is where the COM object register as well.
From the run command ,type dcomcnfg to open MMC .Browse to component services –>computers –>My computer.
This is what i see with red arrow colour down arrow which means component services are disabled hence COM interface unable to register. Why is this disabled ? is this through GPO ? if so ,why not disabled for laptops and desktops but only for VDI ? This is offline topic to be discussed internally with respective teams who disabled it.
There is service that is responsible for it, which is ‘COM+ System Application’ .Start the service (must do with admin rights)
After you start the service,close component services MMC and reopen again.
Browse to COM+ Applications and see if there is any entry related to OfficeC2R.
How do we get OfficeC2R com object here ?
As a simple fix, i restarted Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service (ClickToRunSvc) so the COM object will get created hence registry also created but that did not work.
so what i have done is the following fix which worked and also created simple batch script applied to all computers that did not find the registry key.
How to get OfficeC2RCom Object ?
- Open Regedit and change the value of the registry key HLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate from 1 to 0
2. Restart Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service
3. Open Regedit and change the value of the registry key HLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate from 0 to 1
4. Restart Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service again.
5. Open dcomcnfg to check OfficeC2RCom object and go to Regedit and check the registry key [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B7F1785F-D69B-46F1-92FC-D2DE9C994F13}\InProcServer32]
Registry check
COM object verification (OfficeC2RCom )
I did not find any reference link or i missed that says ,COM+ System Application service must be started for this proplus.
Conclusion to Restore OfficeC2RCom:
- Start the COM+ System Application service
- Open Regedit and change the value of the registry key HLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate from 1 to 0
- Restart Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service.
- Open Regedit and change the value of the registry key HLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate from 0 to 1
- Restart Microsoft Office Click-to-Run Service again.
- Open dcomcnfg to check OfficeC2RCom and go to Regedit and check the registry key [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B7F1785F-D69B-46F1-92FC-D2DE9C994F13}\InProcServer32]
Though the root cause simple and because of the service disable ,but to get the COM interface back,went through lot of troubleshooting .
Hope it helps!