Continued support for Office 2016 (16.16.x) for Mac?

Usage and Config Patch
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I originally posted a summary of this in Slack, but here’s an Official Forum Thread!

As of last week, Microsoft released built 16.17 of Microsoft Office. This updates clients from Office 2016 to Office 2019 (and has the nasty side effect of unlicensing you if you don’t run the Office 2019 volume serializer).

Microsoft is also continuing to release security updates for Office 2016, which continue to have the 16.16.x release number. Right now it’s up to 16.16.2.

In BigFix, at the moment, fixlets for 16.16.0. are superseded by 16.17. There don’t seem to be 16.16.2 fixlets.

Are there plans to support the 16.16.x set of releases to support customers who are not yet ready to upgrade to 16.17? At the very least, it probably makes sense to not have 16.17 supersede 16.16 given the licensing issues at play. Thanks!

Tagging @bma per @jgstew’s suggestion

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The Updates for Mac Applications site checks this page for updates: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Release-notes-for-Office-2016-for-Mac-ed2da564-6d53-4542-9954-7e3209681a41

At the time of content release, the page was not updated with the warning that the 16.17 update does not apply to Office 2016.

Anyways, we’ve removed the 16.17 content from the site and restored the 16.16 update. It can be found in Updates for Mac Applications site 205. Thanks for the warning.

As for 16.16.2, I cannot find it officially on the Microsoft site. It’s not listed in the link above or in the Office for Mac update history page either. Fixlet content must be able to provide a URL to where the content can be found, so if you know where is the page, please let us know.

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Official Microsoft CDN download URLS for Office for Mac are updated at:
https://macadmins.software/

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Thanks but we will need a page that a customer can go back to for reference, like a KB article that shows what has changed from version X to Y. Additionally, unless a customer is knowledgeable, that site has no indication that it’s an official Microsoft site even though the download links point to Microsoft servers.

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Yeah, that’s odd that there are no official release notes pages for the 16.16.2 update. As @alinder said, Microsoft is going to keep issuing 16.16.x security updates for Office 2016 for Mac until January 2020.

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I have this ongoing issue with the old version of 16.16.10 was pushed out and I applied the fillet to our group

Now I’m stuck with a ton of office machines that need a new serial

I am pushing out the updated fixlet of 16.16.0 hoping to fix the issue

but now I’m stuck with a bunch of machines that need a serial #content-authoring
The solution so far has been to reinstall office 2016 with our new Microsoft_Office_2016_VL_Serializer.pkg

This a pain for us as the user needs to uninstall office and reinstall office and it only effected some of user who got the 1st bad patch.

Anyone else running into this issue or have a good solution.

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There is an Office 2019 VL Serializer available in the Microsoft VLSC. If you run that on computers running 16.17, you should be good to go.

Speaking of this topic – any news from IBM about the 16.16.x security releases? It might also be nice to make the 16.17+ fixlets available and just label them differently so folks who do want to push them don’t have to roll their own.

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We just released it in site v207 (see announcement) as Microsoft has finally added a page that lists the Mac Office 2016 history about a week ago. Without that page, we cannot officially support 16.16.2 even though it can be found in the macadmins website because the macadmins website doesn’t have any indications it is an official Microsoft webpage.

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See my previous post. I created it before noticing your new post.

If we have a way of detecting if a user is on volume license or not, then we will re-release the 16.17.0 Fixlets. But once Microsoft releases a patch update for 16.17, e.g. 16.17.1, then we will release new Fixlets for it.

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I was lucky enough to push this out when it was released 1st and it broke a bunch of a my MAC OS office licensees. Now I’m stuck doing the repair

Sucks.

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I can not activate my office 16.17 or 16.18 or 16.19. Only 15.40 version.
I have a Mac mid 2011, High sierra 10.13.6
I tried to activate with serializer 3.0, but it always asks for credentials and it is not activated.
Found that the issue is: no /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.plist file is generated with serializer (only “com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper.plist” in Macintosh/library/launchdemons
an “com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper” in macintosh/library/privilegedHelperTools)

For anyone of you with a successfully activated version, could me tell what are your library office files in “preferences”? Just to check what is my problem