I was recently doing a migration
from Citrix XenApp to Microsoft RDS, we had a requirement to have certain
applications hosted within the RDS environment. However the organization was in
the process of migrating their core communication systems such as Exchange and
Skype for Business to Office 365, therefore a traditional RDS
installation/license of Office would not be available for the RDS server. It
turns out Microsoft have thought of this, and it is possible to install Office
365 ProPlus Click-to-Run within RDS and have multiple licensed users access it
using either session-based desktops or RemoteApps.
The
RDS deployment is all running on a single server in this test environment, when
deploying it I selected the "typical deployment" model, which
automatically installs everything on a single server.
If you are using Office 365 you will probably have AD Connect (or DirSync)
running from your Active Directory. If this is the case the licensed users in
Office 365 will be known in AD and inside Azure AD which is the identity store
for Office 365. It is important to have the users that will be accessing this
RDS server (for Office-apps) in the Remote Desktop Users group. By default the
RDS wizard populates this with the Domain Users principal.
Download the Office Deployment Tool https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49117
which is required to install Office 365 ProPlus correctly on an RDS server. I
don't believe it's possible to do it using the manual download method. When you
download and extra the Office Deployment Tool, there will be a configuration.xml
file in the extracted folder.
Edit this configuration.xml file with Notepad.
The important lines here for an RDS-based deployment is the <Property
Name="SharedComputerLicensing" Value="1" /> this
must be added to the configuration file when RDS, or any other kind of shared
access to a computer is required. I believe this is also required if you are
installing Office 365 ProPlus into VDI, whether it be VMware View, Citrix
XenDesktop or even RDS with Hyper-V.
Open up Command Prompt with Administrative rights
and do a cd to the extracted directory which now contains the ODT setup.exe and
the configuration.xml files.
Run the command setup.exe /download
configuration.xml and this will begin the download of the ProPlus binaries
that are required. This option is also useful if you are installing ProPlus on
mutliple machines and you do not want each device to have to pull down the
installation files from Microsoft's CDN.
When the download switch has completed you must
run the command setup.exe /configure configuration.xml which will begin
the installation of ProPlus based on the information in the configuration file.
The first time each user logs in to the RDS
server they will be asked to activate Office. The user's e-mail address which
is linked to their Office 365 account is required to do this. They will only be
asked to enter this once.
