Deploy Office 365 ProPlus to remote workers

luke-peters

Deploy Office 365 ProPlus to remote workers

Intro line: This article was originally published by Microsoft. To read the original posting of this article, click here.

 

This blog post will address the enterprise IT admin’s challenge on how to deploy Office 365 ProPlus to remote workers without saturating the company’s VPN connections. It will show you how to implement a tactical approach which allows an IT admin to stay in control and quickly relief the pain of VPN congestion by offloading content distribution to the Microsoft Content Delivery Network (CDN). Maybe you are in the process of moving off legacy versions of Office and want to keep the pace with e.g. the Office 2010 end-of-support approaching fast. There are multiple strategic solutions available (e.g. Intune and Windows Autopilot), but for now we focus on a quick fix.

 

Overview of blog post series

 

This blog post is part of a series, which is brought to you by the Office Rangers Team at Microsoft, a group of senior deployment experts. The series provides guidance on how to address scenarios around working-from-home across the lifecycle of an Office 365 ProPlus installation:

 

 

We hope this will help you to minimize the impact of deploying, servicing and managing Office 365 ProPlus on your own network and your user’s VPN connections.

 

The Concept

 

With the approach described below, we want to achieve two things:

 

  • Keep IT admins in control what happens when by continue using your enterprise management solution like Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (formally known as System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM))
  • Offloading the content distribution to Microsoft’s CDN to allow remote user to leverage their local internet connection instead of pulling large source files from your ConfigMgr Distribution Points over VPN connections

 

We will walk you through the process on how to adjust an existing Office 365 ProPlus deployment package for a hybrid approach, update your sources and ensure that the source file download will bypass your VPN.

 

Step 1 – Adjust your deployment package

 

To allow remote users to leverage their local internet connection for source file access, we have to remove the source files from the Configuration Manager application. Navigate to the folder which is holding your software sources, locate the “office” folder and delete it:

 

 

In the above example, 11 Language Packs were included in the deployment package, bumping the size up to 6+ gigabytes. Keep the setup.exe as well as any configuration files located in the folder. This reduces the size of your deployment package to less than 10 megabyte. That’s a huge saving on your VPN connections.

 

In case you don’t have an Office 365 ProPlus installation package yet, you can use the built-in wizard to create one. Maybe you want to adjust the handling of languages, instead of hard-coding those you might want to use MatchOS or MatchPreviousMSI. After that, apply the steps above.

 

Step 2 – Update the content sources

 

If your application was already synced to Distribution Points, those still have the larger package cached. Navigate to Software Library > Application Management > Applications, select your application, switch to the Deployment Types Tab, right-click the appropriate entry and click Update Content.

 

 

This will re-sync any changes to your Distribution Points, so those will now also have the smaller deployment package ready to sync to devices.

 

Step 3 – Verify VPN configuration and deploy

 

Once a client has received the smaller deployment package through ConfigMgr and kicks off the installation, it will download the source files directly from the Microsoft CDN. It is important to ensure that your devices can actually reach out to those endpoints directly and don’t backhaul through the VPN tunnel. We published guidance on how to enable so-called VPN split-tunneling, the endpoints relevant for Office 365 ProPlus source file download are listed at Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges as entry #92.

 

If you already have an active deployment of the newly-updated package, clients will start receiving it after the Distribution Points have finished syncing the changes. If you want to start with a fresh deployment, just follow the regular guidelines in your organization.

 

Step 4 – Leverage peer caching to reduce on-prem traffic (optional)

 

The following step is not required, but highly recommended. In order to use the same deployment package for your remote and on-premises workers, we recommend to configure and enable Delivery Optimization for Office in combination with Connected Cache. This will enable your on-prem devices to share content which is no longer included in the deployment and greatly reduce the load on your corporate internet connection.

 

FAQ

 

Q: We usually controlled which build is installed by embedding the matching source files. How can I control this now?
A: By default, setup will fetch the latest build available for the specified update channel. You can use the version attribute in the configuration file to specify a build. This might be important if your organization is wants to deploy the older SAC feature release.

 

The Authors

 

This blog post is brought to you by @Martin Nothnagel from the Office 365 ProPlus Ranger Team at Microsoft. Feel free to share your questions and feedback in the comments below.

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Steve’s been with SMB Suite since 1998 and has been involved with nearly every aspects of the Company’s business as a strategist, professional services executive, cloud solutions architect, and senior consultant. In his current role, Steve is responsible for SMB Suite’s revenue and oversees the execution of ERP, CRM and BI projects for customers across a broad range of industries. Steve combines his expertise in MS Dynamics GP, CRM and other Microsoft products with a strong foundation in accounting and business to identify gaps and streamline customers’ processes. Prior to co-founding SMB Suite, Steve was previously Corporate Controller for MEHLE Behr and, prior to that, Audit Senior for Ernst & Young. Steve holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Texas at Arlington.

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Monty is responsible for SMB Suite’s day-to-day operation and, most importantly, its customers. As a leader, motivator and mentor, Monty creates loyal high performance teams willing to “walk through walls” to accomplish their goals. Prior to SMB Suite, Monty served as President of The Bradshaw Group (TBG), a global distributor, manufacturer, and repair facility for digital printers. In this role, he was the Company’s ambassador to its most important domestic, European and Latin American customers and TBG achieved a best-in-class Net Promoter Score of 74 for its superb customer satisfaction. Prior to TBG, Monty served as the General Manager of Sam’s Clubs three highest grossing U.S. stores and was named Regional Operator of the Year in 1999. Monty holds a BBA in Marketing from Texas Tech University and is an active member of Business Navigators. He has been active in Vistage International, Executives in Action, the Dallas/Fort Worth Retail Executives Association, as well as, A.P.I.C.S., the leading professional association for supply chain and operations management. Monty also volunteers with Hunger Busters and ManeGait, a therapeutic horsemanship organization.

David is a proven financial and information technology professional with expertise in providing business accounting software and computing solutions. He began his career by starting and managing a successful independent consulting practice for several years. He then launched the local systems consulting unit of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurial Services Group, leading the office into the hi-tech consulting arena. After successfully developing the unit for Ernst & Young, David founded NextCorp (which became SMB Suite in 2013) to serve the business software needs of clients throughout the US. David has made SMB Suite one of the best cloud ERP providers in the industry. In addition to being a successful entrepreneur and leader, he is a software and technology specialist, holding certifications in various Microsoft and other technologies.