Hey there! I’m trying to find a way to remove all MS Office versions from all endusers computers; the following are what we have on endusers clients which are both win/mac:
Office 2008 Mac
Office 2011 Mac
Office 2013 Mac
Office 2007 Win
Office 2010 Win
Office 2016 Mac / Win
However we have a list of authorized users for Office 2016 Mac/Win. So could I just create a manual group and put these users in it and then set a relevancy check for that group so they don’t get the fixlet pushed to them? I’m not sure how to word this relevancy, so some help there would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance for your help!
A complexity here is the BigFix system is more designed around endpoints and not users. While we do have user inspectors it will be a bit more of an issue to limit to a specific set of users as if the user can log onto any machine, which is their primary machine etc.
I’ve done this before on the Windows side, and the best way I found was start is with the Microsoft Fixit, which already has the PowerShell scripts to remove Office - almost any office. Extract the relevant .ps1 files you’ll need with a file compression manager after getting it from here: from Microsoft here.
Or you can forumulate your own using the base instructions from Microsoft under the title Manually uninstall Office.
I would handle the Mac uninstall as a separate action - but on the surface, it’s easier. Kill it and RM -R the applications. You may need to include some detection loops to avoid erroring out on any missing applications. You can get a report of the relevant application names using Bigfix WebReports. Removing user folder data may be a challenge - not sure. More details on what needs to be removed here.
It is definitely possible to target endpoints based upon almost any characteristic like username - even including higher level characteristics such as group membership, however it is inadvisable to do so (I don’t have the best explanation available, however BenKus and others cover some helpful and related conversation over at IBM Developer works under Topic: Computer Group in relevance
In lieu of targeting as a group, I would use excel, match and remove, and target only workstations not matching your list of allowed users. You may need to audit several times. However, if you insist on pursuing the group based approach just be forewarned you may find yourself with some unexpected processing overhead to process the group membership and unexpected behavior, so test with blank actions first (it will also take a few rounds to fully percolate through and report all the member/not-member details).
@rdshift
I finished all the Mac side for this uninstallation, but was looking into this for Windows and was wondering which of the .ps1 files I would need for uninstalling Office 2016 for example. I tried to use the CL_RemoveOffice2016.ps1 that I extracted using WinRAR, however it doesn’t work alone. I’m guessing there are some things that it uses within the o15-ctrremove.diagcab that I got from your Microsoft link above.
That’s correct. You must also remove the Click To Run (CTR) elements, which is the deployment framework (and much more). Try using just those two, and your run time will be notably decreased vs running all the removals, and you should get successful and complete removal of all elements, assuming you only have 2016 install elements/residue. Most recently in my environment, I removed CTR, 2013, and 2016, because some individuals had different non-O365 versions of 2016, then redeployed 2016.