Microsoft Office 365/2016/2019/2021 patch content inconsistencies

Usage and Config Patch
1

I’ve been poking around in the Patches for Windows site and ended up with more than a few questions in my head that seem puzzling.

Office 365 & Office 2016 offered support for 3 ways to get updates applied: Direct from Microsoft, using a “Network Share” which requires a Windows host and also the “client local cache” to leverage BEScache

Meanwhile from what I can tell Office 2019 only offers support for 2 ways to get updates applied: Direct from Microsoft & using a “Network Share” which requires a Windows host

Additionally I cannot find patches for Office 2021 listed in the patch site even though the product was released by Microsoft in October of 2021.

Any thoughts on why BEScache support was seemingly dropped when MS released v2019 while still offering the same functionality for 365 (both 2019 & 365 use the Click-to-Run deployment engine)? Also is there a reason it appears no content is being created to support patching of Office 2021?

2

We have since found that Office 2021 patches are available but following the same thing as Office 2019 (MS CDN downloads or using a network share which has to have access to the MS CDN as well).

Has anyone else used BigFix to patch 2016/2019/2021 Office builds lately? If so would you mind offering how your org is handling the WAN impact (don’t use the perpetual licensed product, don’t mind the clients going direct to MS CDN, localized network shares, something else…).

At this point the purpose/idea of using BigFix to manage patch seems to be defeated as all of these Office downloads do not take advantage of the BES infrastructure to protect WAN circuits (either take the hit to go to a central point for a network share or everyone go direct to MS) – unless we are missing something.

3

We do passive, late start (After 7 PM) patching with baselines for two weeks. Once the two weeks completes, we move to deployments with a message and a deadline. It is unlikely that all the users will accept the task at the same time and with this, it tends to avoid network issues. We moved to this method about 5 months ago and have not had any complaints.

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