The world today has moved towards online collaboration tools. The same goes for the installation of your Office 365. You can directly download the setup files and install Office 365 from the Microsoft download site. Of course, online installation avoids the need to download the complete installation files before installing client applications. However, there are situations where you would need to opt for the offline setup of Office 365. How would you use the Office 365 business premium offline installer? Let us guide you on the exact process involved in the task.
- To provide customers with the greatest amount of flexibility, different payment options are available. Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Apps for business, Business Standard, and Business Premium plans are available for monthly commitment payment or annual commitment payment.
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Office 365 Enterprise E1 plans. They include the Office Online apps only. Do you want each user in your organization to have business class email? If you want your users to have business class email, calendar, and contacts with a 50 GB inbox per user, choose a business plan that includes email.
Why use Office 365 Offline Installer?
Microsoft offers you an excellent option for installing your Office 365 subscription. Just sign in to your Office account and click on Install. The web setup or the online installer will be downloaded onto your computer. That does it. Clicking on the online installer will begin installing your corresponding files after downloading them as per your needs. You do not need to interfere in any manner with your installation process.
Office 365 business plans are now Microsoft 365 business plans. New name, same great value, same price. Office 365 Business Essentials is now Microsoft 365 Business Basic; Office 365 Business Premium is now Microsoft 365 Business Standard; Microsoft 365 Business is now Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
Of course, we do not find anything wrong with the online installation. However, there are a few issues you may come across when using the online installer. Some unforeseen circumstances can hinder the process of proper download and installation of your Office 365 subscription.
One of the significant issues that can make the online installer one of the worst options is when you need to install your Office subscription multiple times. Reinstalling your Office 365 quite frequently can be one of the reasons you would prefer an offline installer. Opting for the online installer in such cases can be worrisome because you need to sign in to your Office account and download the large installation files frequently. In those situations, having an offline installer can be an excellent option.
The Offline installer can be quite handy enough when you have subscribed to the Office 365 plans like Business Premium, which allows you to install Office 365 on multiple devices. You would only need to download the offline installer once, and you will need to use it on all your devices to install Office 365. No matter how many times you would reinstall your Office 365 subscription, you will never need to wait for the installation files to be downloaded. It can also be a great option when you have a slower internet connection.
How to download Office 365 Offline Installer?
There is no issue to download the Office 365 offline installer. What makes it even a great option is that you do not need to depend upon any third party sources to download the offline installer. Microsoft offers you a completely legal and more accessible alternative to download and install office 365 offline installer.
However, before you can decide to download the Office 365 offline installer, you need to check out a few factors and requirements. The most important among them is you should have a subscription plan. Downloading or installing Office 365 offline installer without access to an active subscription plan may not be a good idea.
The steps for downloading the Office 365 offline installer would be as per the steps here below –
- Visit the official Office site through any of your favorite web browsers.
- Sign in to your Office account.
- Your subscription plan should be visible under your account.
- Click on
- You should find the option for the installation options under the Installation options.
- Locate and click on the link Language and install options
- Find the Additional Install Options link on the page.
- Click on the link.
- You should find the option to download the offline installer.
- Click on the link Download Offline Installer.
That does it. You can choose the language for the installation file and the version (whether 32 bit or 64 bit) before beginning to download offline installer.
How to use and install Office 365 Offline Installer?
There is a considerable difference between the installation file for any other applications in the Office 365 suite. The Office 365 offline installer comes in the form of an IMG file. To run the installation files in the IMG format, you would need to mount it on the operating system.
If you have Windows 10 or 8.1, you would not need to depend upon the third party option for mounting the IMG file on the operating system. These operating systems come with an out of the box support for IMG file.
Here are the steps involved in mounting the IMG file on your Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 device –
- Go to the file explorer on your device and locate the installer file that you just downloaded.
- Right-click on the IMG file and click on Mount option among the contextual menu.
- You will now be able to find the installer on your device.
- Click on Setup option to begin installing your Office 365 Business Premium subscription.
- Follow the instructions to install your Office 365 carefully
Once the application is installed, you can sign in to the service with your email ID. Please note that the email ID should be the same as the one you have used to sign up and subscribed to Office 365.
If you are on Windows 7 or another operating system, you will need to rely upon the third party application to mount the IMG file on your computer. One of the most popular IMG mounting software options would include Virtual CloneDrive. You can choose any of your favorite IMG mounting software options on your device.
How to use Office 365 Business Premium Offline Installer?
If you have subscribed to Business Premium plan or any of the business plans under Office 365, the method will not work. Since you have opted for the business plan, the installation will be possible only through the Office Deployment Tool. You can opt for the offline installer either through command prompt or script.
The method is a little complicated.
Here is how you would be able to do it –
- Create a new folder on your computer with the name Office 365. You can name it to office offline or anything else at your preference.
- You can download the Office Deployment tool from this link.
- Run the Office Deployment tool and extract the files into the newly created folder above.
- Find the files inside the folder that you have just launched.
- The folder will now have two files – exe and configuration.xml
- Open the XML file in Notepad and edit it. Make the changes as outlined here –
Please note that you would need to make the changes as shown in the Red color. The C:Office365 refers to the folder you created in the first step. 64 in the above code refers to the 64-bit architecture. If you are on a 32-bit machine, change it to 32. The product ID as in the above code will be O365BusinessRetail for Office 365 Business plan. For the other programs, you will use O365ProPlusRetail.
- Once the code is changed, save it.
- Now, launch Command Prompt, and run the following commands pressing Enter it after each command.
- The download will now begin. Wait till the download is completed. A new folder will be created by the name Office in the new folder you created.
- Once the installer is downloaded, execute the following command to begin the installation
Once the installation is complete, you will need to get it activated through your IT administrator. Your admin should be able to activate the copy with the volume license key. In fact, this is the only way you would be able to use the offline installer on the Office 365 Business Premium plan.
A slight variation of the above steps would include the following steps –
- Download and install the Office Deployment Tool as in the above steps.
- Create a folder named Office
- Extract and save the files from the Deployment Tool in the newly created folder.
- Open Notepad on your computer
- Enter the following code and save the file.
- Save the above file as XML
- Launch RUN dialog box and execute the following command
- Accept UAC if prompted to do so.
- You should find the folder named c:ODTsetup.exe. The offline installation files for your Office 365 Business plan will begin downloading into your newly created folder.
Wait patiently till the download is completed. Please note that the installation progress will not be available for your needs. You will get the confirmation that the installation is complete when the dialog box closes on its own.
Once the download is complete, begin installation using the following command through the dialog box –
The Concluding Thoughts
That was how you would be able to use Office 365 Business Premium offline installer. Ideally, the Office 365 Business plans do not have access to the offline installer through Microsoft Office. Office 365 does not offer an easy to use the offline installer as such.
The slightly complicated option outlined in the compilation here should be helpful enough in arriving at the simple and easy enough to work with. Do note that the file size would be between 4 and 5 GB. It will be helpful enough to avoid unneeded data consumption, especially when you are looking to install Office 365 on multiple devices as per your chosen plan.
More on Office 365:
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Tip
The information in this article is intended for administrators and IT Pros. For information about activating a personal copy of Office, see Activate Office.
Shared computer activation lets you deploy Microsoft 365 Apps to a computer in your organization that is accessed by multiple users. Here are some examples of supported scenarios:
- Three workers at a factory share the same physical computer, with each worker using Office on that computer during their eight-hour shift.
- Fifteen nurses at a hospital use Office on ten different computers throughout the day.
- Five employees connect remotely to the same computer to run Office.
- Multiple employees use Office on a computer that's located in a conference room or some other public space in the company.
- Multiple users access an instance of Office that is hosted through Remote Desktop Services (RDS).
Shared computer activation is required for scenarios where multiple users share the same computer and the users are logging in with their own account. Normally, users can install and activate Microsoft 365 Apps only on a limited number of devices, such as 5 PCs. Using Microsoft 365 Apps with shared computer activation enabled doesn't count against that limit. If your users have dedicated computers and no other users work on those computers, you use product key activation for Microsoft 365 Apps.
How to enable shared computer activation for Microsoft 365 Apps
To use shared computer activation, you need an Office 365 (or Microsoft 365) plan that includes Microsoft 365 Apps and also supports shared computer activation. Shared computer activation is available for the following plans:
- Any plan that includes Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise (previously named Office 365 Plus). For example, Office 365 E3 or Microsoft 365 E5.
- Any plan that includes the desktop version of Project or Visio. For example, Project Plan 3 or Visio Plan 2.
- The Microsoft 365 Business Premium plan, which includes Microsoft 365 Apps for business.
Note
- The Microsoft 365 Business Premium plan is the only business plan that includes support for shared computer activation. There are other business plans, such as Microsoft 365 Business Standard, that include Microsoft 365 Apps for business, but, those business plans don't include support for shared computer activation.
- Shared computer activation is available for Education plans that include Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. For example, Office 365 A3 or Microsoft 365 A5.
- Shared computer activation isn't available for Office for Mac.
Make sure you assign each user a license for Microsoft 365 Apps and that users log on to the shared computer with their own user account.
If you want to enable shared computer activation during the initial installation of Microsoft 365 Apps, you can instruct the Office Deployment Tool to do so during installation.
- When you are using the Office Customization Tool at config.office.com or the wizard built into Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, make sure that you enable the option Shared Computer in the Product activation section.
- When you are crafting the configuration file manually, make sure to include the following line:
If Microsoft 365 Apps is already installed and you want to enable shared computer activation, there are three options to choose from. A re-installation is not required. The device must be rebooted in order to apply the change.
Use Group Policy by downloading the most current Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Office and enabling the 'Use shared computer activation' policy setting. This policy setting is found under Computer ConfigurationPoliciesAdministrative TemplatesMicrosoft Office 2016 (Machine)Licensing Settings.
Use Registry Editor to add a String value (Reg_SZ) of SharedComputerLicensing with a setting of 1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOfficeClickToRunConfiguration.
Download and run the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. This is required to change the activation method from subscription mode to shared mode.
Note
Microsoft 365 Apps for business doesn't support the use of Group Policy, so you'll need to use another method to enable shared computer activation.If a user already activated the Microsoft 365 Apps before shared computer activation was enabled, you have to reset the activation to allow shared computer activation to work.
After Microsoft 365 Apps is installed, you can verify that shared computer activation is enabled on that computer.
How shared computer activation works for Microsoft 365 Apps
Here's what happens after Microsoft 365 Apps is installed on a computer that has shared computer activation enabled.
A user logs on to the computer with their account.
The user starts an Office program, such as Word.
Microsoft 365 Apps contacts the Office Licensing Service on the internet to obtain a licensing token for the user.
To determine whether the user is licensed to use Microsoft 365 Apps, the Office Licensing Service has to know the user's account for Office 365. In some cases, Microsoft 365 Apps prompts the user to provide the information. For example, the user might see the Activate Office dialog box.
If your environment is configured to synchronize Office 365 (Azure Active Directory) and local Active Directory (AD) accounts, then the user most likely won't see any prompts. Microsoft 365 Apps should automatically be able to get the necessary information about the user's account in Office 365.
If the user is licensed for Microsoft 365 Apps, a licensing token is stored on the computer in the user's profile folder, and Microsoft 365 Apps is activated. The user can now use Microsoft 365 Apps.
These steps are repeated for each user who logs on to the shared computer. Each user gets a unique licensing token. Just because one user activates Microsoft 365 Apps on the computer doesn't mean Microsoft 365 Apps is activated for all other users who log on to the computer.
If a user goes to another computer that also is enabled for shared computer activation, the same steps occur. There is a different licensing token for each computer that the user logs on to.
If a user logs on to a shared computer again, Microsoft 365 Apps uses the same licensing token, if it is still valid.
Additional details about shared computer activation for Microsoft 365 Apps
Licensing token renewal The licensing token that is stored on the shared computer is valid only for 30 days. As the expiration date for the licensing token nears, Microsoft 365 Apps automatically attempts to renew the licensing token when the user is logged on to the computer and using Microsoft 365 Apps.
If the user doesn't log on to the shared computer for 30 days, the licensing token can expire. The next time that the user tries to use Microsoft 365 Apps, Microsoft 365 Apps contacts the Office Licensing Service on the internet to get a new licensing token.
Internet connectivity Because the shared computer has to contact the Office Licensing Service on the internet to obtain or renew a licensing token, reliable connectivity between the shared computer and the internet is necessary.
Reduced functionality mode If the user is not licensed for Microsoft 365 Apps, or if the user closed the Activate Office dialog box, no licensing token is obtained and Microsoft 365 Apps isn't activated. Microsoft 365 Apps is now in reduced functionality mode. This means that the user can view and print Office documents, but can't create or edit documents. The user also sees a message in the Office program that most features are turned off.
Activation limits Normally, users can install and activate Microsoft 365 Apps only on a limited number of devices, such as 5 PCs. Using Microsoft 365 Apps with shared computer activation enabled doesn't count against that limit.
Microsoft allows a single user to activate Microsoft 365 Apps on a reasonable number of shared computers in a given time period. The user gets an error message in the unlikely event the limit is exceeded.
Single sign-on recommended The use of single sign-on (SSO) is recommended to reduce how often users are prompted to sign in for activation. With single sign-on configured, Microsoft 365 Apps is activated using the user credentials that the user provides to sign in to Windows, as long as the user has been assigned a license for Microsoft 365 Apps. For more information, see Microsoft 365 identity models and Azure Active Directory.
Office 365 For Business Download
If you don't use single sign-on, you should consider using roaming profiles and include the %localappdata%MicrosoftOffice16.0Licensing folder as part of the roaming profile.
Download Office 365 Business Premium
Licensing token roaming Starting with Version 1704 of Microsoft 365 Apps, you can configure the licensing token to roam with the user's profile or be located on a shared folder on the network. Previously, the licensing token was always saved to a specific folder on the local computer and was associated with that specific computer. In those cases, if the user signed in to a different computer, the user would be prompted to activate Microsoft 365 Apps on that computer in order to get a new licensing token. The ability to roam the licensing token is especially helpful for non-persistent VDI scenarios.
To configure licensing token roaming, you can use either the Office Deployment Tool or Group Policy, or you can use Registry Editor to edit the registry. Whichever method you choose, you need to provide a folder location that is unique to the user. The folder location can either be part of the user's roaming profile or a shared folder on the network. Microsoft 365 Apps needs to be able to write to that folder location. If you're using a shared folder on the network, be aware that network latency problems can adversely impact the time it takes to open Office programs. The location is only needed if you prefer to not use the default location, which is %localappdata%MicrosoftOffice16.0Licensing.
If you're using Group Policy, download the most current Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Office and enable the 'Specify the location to save the licensing token used by shared computer activation' policy setting. This policy setting is found under Computer ConfigurationPoliciesAdministrative TemplatesMicrosoft Office 2016 (Machine)Licensing Settings.
If you're using the Office Deployment Tool, include the SCLCacheOverride and SCLCacheOverrideDirectory in the Property element of your configuration.xml file. For more information, see Configuration options for the Office Deployment Tool.
To edit the registry, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOfficeClickToRunConfiguration, add a string value of SCLCacheOverride, and set the value to 1. Also, add a string value of SCLCacheOverrideDirectory and set the value to the path of the folder to save the licensing token.
Note
If you're using Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) to deploy Microsoft 365 Apps, the registry location is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftOffice16.0CommonLicensing.
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