Office 365 for MacOS in a school environment

[lpratt]

Can I deploy office 365 desktop apps to shared macOS devices? If so, how do I do this?

 

If not, how are others deploying office to shared Mac's?

[DalekSec]

Do you have an MDM to manage the Macs? The office apps are all on the Mac App store now so you can push them out from there via an MDM

[lpratt]

This is true, but it will ask the users to sign into Office and then ultimately use one of their 5 licenses they have available to them - we don't want that to be happening.

[Mrpower]

The Office Apps will work but only in "read only" mode. Until a licence is installed, then they will work as normal. but yes it will use one of the licence up.

[tg12]

Random question here, just trying to brainstorm things (not had to try and license Office 365 for shared Macs in a while). Office 2016/2019 had a Volume License Serialiser where you could run the .pkg and it would license it with your Microsoft volume licensing. Do they do something similar for Office 365?

[Mrpower]

Alas its a 365 licence only theses days. So I have been informed. I thought similar to your thoughts TG12, there use to be a volume licence version, but now it's 365 licence version only.

[joewb]

You can deploy the apps via VPP or custom packages, then a separate config profile with the users email (assuming that your MDM can read your AD) to suppress all the annoying pop ups and do most of the sign in for the user.

We support a few schools running this, very rarely have issues with licensing. We tend to find students sit in the same places and Microsoft aren’t too hot on the 5 licenses when they are all from the same WAN IP address.