Sorry, office can’t be activated because it doesn’t meet the requirements for running on Remote Desktop Services

Question

Hello,

We have a user that has started to receive the error "Sorry, office can’t be activated because it doesn’t meet the requirements for running on Remote Desktop Services" when they try to launch Word, Outlook or Excel when logged into our server using RDP. They have an E3 license and this issue started 2 weeks ago, where it was working fine for them for 2+ years before that. We have dozens of other users at this company that are not experiencing the issue, but we do notice now when we make new users in Active Directory and make them a Microsoft account and sign them into Remote Desktop, they also get the error when launching Word, etc.

Any ideas on what would have caused this would be greatly appreciated.

Pete

Answer 1

Hi Peter,

That message appears when Office is installed on an RDS/Terminal Server without Shared Computer Activation (SCA) enabled - or when the licensing token can’t be issued for a new user. Hopefully, my suggestion below might help you to fix it:

Check that SCA is really turned on

1. From the RDS host, open Word > File > Account > About Word. If SCA is enabled you’ll see “Shared Computer Activation” on the second line. If you see a Product ID instead, SCA isn’t enabled.
2. Or look in the registry:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration
   SharedComputerLicensing   REG_SZ   1

If the value is missing or set to 0, SCA is off.

Turn on (or re-enable) SCA

You don’t have to reinstall Office - just add the setting and reboot the host.

• Group Policy: Import the latest Office ADMX templates and enable Computer Config → Administrative Templates → Microsoft Office 2016 (Machine) → Licensing Settings → “Use shared computer activation”``.
• Registry: Add the string above and set it to 1.

Confirm the licence itself is valid

Office 365 E3 does include Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, which supports SCA. Just make sure every affected user really has that service assigned in M365 Admin -> Users -> Licences.

Clear a stale licensing token (per-user)

Sometimes the first user who activated before SCA was enabled keeps working, but new users fail. For any user still getting the error after step 2:

1. Sign the user out of all Office apps.
2. Delete their token folder on the RDS server: %localappdata%\Microsoft\Office\Licensing\*
3. Have the user sign back in to Word. A fresh token will be issued.

Other things that block activation

• Server OS not supported: Microsoft 365 Apps is only supported on Server 2019/2016 (until Oct 2025) or Server 2022 (until Oct 2026).
• Office can’t reach the Office Licensing Service: Confirm the server has outbound TLS 1.2 to *.microsoft.com and isn’t blocked by a proxy/SSL inspection device.
• Users sign in with on-prem accounts only: The first time they start Word they must sign in with an Azure AD/Microsoft 365 identity that owns the licence.

If you still face the issue, please kindly run the Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant (SaRA) in Shared Computer Activation mode - it automates every step above and usually fixes the token and registry in one go.

Make sure SCA is switched on at the host level, verify each user’s E3 licence, then clear any old licensing tokens. After that new (and existing) users should activate without the “doesn’t meet the requirements for Remote Desktop Services” error.

Hope that helps!

Best regards,

Finn Dang.