Win 11 and Office 365

[ITGURU]

As part of our next deployment we will be looking to deploy windows 11 with office 365. I gather KMS is no longer an option for office 365 and uses online activation or shared computer activation?

Are there any offline activation methods available i.e exam laptops which dont have internet connectivity, and if the machines had no internet access does that mean users would be unable to use office on the machine until it was restored?

[jmak]

There's also device based activation which doesn't require users to log in (unlike shared computer activation). It is part of your entitlement if you have A3 or A5 licenses.

 

They do need to connect to the Internet to activate - but only once every thirty days.

 

If you have a domain, you add them to an M365 group in your tenancy and set a group policy to spare the licence. There's a slightly different procedure of the clients aren't part of a domain, but I'm not familiar with that because a different team managed our Azure only devices.

 

There is a licence which allows you 180 days between activations, but I've asked and our reseller took it up with Microsoft and they said it's not available to academic customers.

 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/device-based-licensing

Edited September 11, 2023 by jmak

[dmason2]

we had the same issue with exam users on o365 for a work around we had to have them sign in , activate and sign out and remove internet access, this was done just once as as you can imagine was a huge pain, we ended up deploying Office LTSC instead