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Licensing Office 365 Apps for Enterprise on a Terminal Server without connected services OneDrive and Sharepoint

Anonymous
2021-01-19T23:28:25+00:00

Hello,

I've installed Office Apps for Enterprise onto a Server 2016 Remote Desktop server (using the ODT with shared licensing).  We are experiencing constant "activation", "verify" and "sign in" prompts from users' Office applications.  Here are the details:  

Requirements:

Provide Office apps on a RDS for 30 remote users.  They do not need access to OneDrive or Sharepoint. 

Configuration steps:

  • Install 2019 Apps for Enterprise using ODT.  Shared licensing enabled
  • Add 30 users to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, assign a Microsoft 365 Enterprise Apps license to each user
  • Login as each individual user to our RDS, launch an Office app and sign in with the admin account credentials to activate the install for that user
  • Sign out of the admin account from File>Account

So we ended up with 30 users connecting to our RDS and 30 licenses purchased in the Admin Center, but no Microsoft account signed in on any of the user sessions.  Perfect - because we don't want users to have any cloud access.\

This worked fine until after a week or so, the yellow bar notification appeared stating the user had to sign in to a Microsoft account to keep all features of Office enabled.  I did not think this was required as I was under the impression that activating the install and the signed in account were independent.

Still, ok - maybe each user has to login to their own Admin Center account.  This is definitely not what we want, but if I could do it just once and be done with it, that's ok.

Next steps:

  • Login as each individual user, sign in via File>Account in Word or Excel with each individual user's Microsoft account (******@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com)
  • However, Office has continue to regularly have license issues... users (random) will receive the yellow bar notification that features will be disabled or "Sorry, we can't get to your account right now"

Two things I need to accomplish that should really be so very easy but, of course, aren't:

  1. How can I make Office not constantly prompt these RDP users to verify their license or sign in to an account?
  2. How can I disconnect the OneDrive and Sharepoint services from their Office instance?

(For #2, I found some documentation on using Powershell to create a license option without these services and then assigning users this license, but the Set-MsolUserLicense command fails when I try to assign.

Thanks very much to anyone who can provide help,

DD

Microsoft 365 and Office | Subscription, account, billing | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-01-20T03:41:34+00:00

    Hi Group_BR,

    Welcome to the Answers community.

    Few months ago, Office 365 was renamed to Microsoft 365, I am not sure about the exact duration, but I suppose after the name change, the behavior of Office sign in/sign out was also changed.

    Now, if you sign out, your apps will be deactivated. You can view and print files, but not create or edit files, until you sign back in. Office remains activated as long as you're signed in. It doesn’t matter whether you are working on Remote Desktop server or Windows, this behavior is same for all users.

    Reference: How sign in works in Microsoft 365

    So, to answers your first question “*How can I make Office not constantly prompt these RDP users to verify their license or sign in to an account?”,*we have to stay signed in to Office so that your apps remain activated otherwise, you’ll get the prompt and your apps will be deactivated. Since you have assigned license to user (ensure they don’t have admin role, only user role in Microsoft 365 admin center), you can let the users sign in with their account.

    To answer your second question “How can I disconnect the OneDrive and SharePoint services from their Office instance?”, we can only remove connected services that we added ourselves. Those services that are included in your subscription, like SharePoint or OneDrive for Business cannot be removed.

    I understand you have tried using PowerShell to license option without these services and you received an error, as an alternative, you can use the Active users page in Microsoft 365 admin center to Manage product licenses **** and remove these services****for bulk users.

    I tested by removing the SharePoint online and OneDrive services and then signing into Office apps, but this does not make any difference, I can still see the Connected services in File>Account page of any Office app (such as Word or Excel). This is due to the fact that though we have removed the services, but the user still has the storage space according to the Organization settings.

    In this scenario, you can consider using Group Policy settings and registry modification to block access to OneDrive from within the Office applications. For more info, see How to block OneDrive use from within Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and Office 2016 applications

    We appreciate your understanding and co-operation.

    With sincerest regards,

    Neha

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