Onboarding client computers to a Microsoft 365 Tenancy has its challenges, far too many for me to try to cover in detail in a single blog post. There is one that seems to rear its head time and time again and that’s how to deal with pre-existing office installations if you are not given the scope to create a fresh image.
I’ll jump out here and reinforce that I am an advocate for onboarding machines to Microsoft 365 and Endpoint Manager with a clean image of windows. A new SOE build of Windows is always going to give the best results long term, but what if it is not an option. Customer wants to onboard existing machines and run a SOE plan later for new machines moving forward?
Pre-existing office installations are a giant pain in the ass when you are trying to deploy a managed Office install via Intune. Although there are options in both the Endpoint Manager interface and the Office XML file to remove existing office versions, they often come up short and result in a failed app deployment.
Microsoft have had GUI base utilities to clean office installations off a machine for a while but as in all Modern Work environments we to try to avoid tasks that require manual intervention, automation is the key to simplicity and scalability.
I was presented with this issue again this week and was gearing myself up for another painful modification to the old VBS scripts that I have use for a while but then as luck would have it, I found this little gem from Microsoft. It’s a command line version of the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. This tool is base off the GUI tool that has been around for a while, the GUI based tool has saved me so much pain over the years when onsite dealing with unhealthy office deployments.
Now we can add this tools ability to scrub existing office deployment into a PSADT (Powershell Application Deployment toolkit) rapped application and deploy via Endpoint Manager (Intune).
Simply add the tools extracted files to the PSATD files directory and “SaRAcmd.exe -S OfficeScrubScenario -AcceptEula” to the pre installation tasks.
This is in my opinion a simple solution that improves the clients onboarding experience when you don’t have the project scope to deploy fresh builds.
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