Recently the Office 365 applications have been added to the Workspace ONE UEM Enterprise Application Repository (EAR). This allows customers to quickly deploy Office 365 to their managed Windows devices.

A couple of different versions and languages have been added as you can see in this screenshot:

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At this moment, four languages are available: English, German, French and Dutch.

Three different channels are available: Current Channel, Monthly Enterprise Channel and Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel.

And two bitness versions: 32 bit (x86) and 64 bit (x64).

One of the benefits of Microsoft 365 Apps is that Microsoft provides new (and updated) features for Office apps, such as Excel and Word, on a regular basis. You can control how often the users in your organization get these new features by specifying the update channel.

There are three primary update channels:

  1. Current Channel
  2. Monthly Enterprise Channel
  3. Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel

Current Channel provides your users with the newest Office features as soon as they’re ready. If you need additional predictability of when these new Office features are released each month, use the Monthly Enterprise Channel. In those cases where you have select devices that require extensive testing before receiving new features, Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel can be used.

More information on the different channels can be found here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-update-channels

To start using these new apps, simply use your Workspace ONE UEM console and go to Resources – Apps – Native. Click ‘Add’ and select ‘From Enterprise Application Repository.’

Search for ‘365’ and you will be presented with the options available. Once you have selected a version and clicked Next, you get asked if you want to receive Notifications when a newer version becomes available.

Graphical user interface, application Description automatically generated

And finally, you can review the options and click Save.

As you can see from the installation command, this will use the online installer, which is a small executable that will download the Office installation files from the Microsoft Content Delivery network (CDN) during installation on the endpoint.

Graphical user interface, text, application, email Description automatically generated

No all you need to do is assign this new application to a Smart Group and you are good to go.

If you are looking for more details on the update history, frequency, versions, update sizes and release notes, for all the different channels, you can find them here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-microsoft365-apps-by-date

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