Good morning and thank you for the reply.
I wanted to update you, as I was not ignoring your response here.
At this point we are still stuck and cannot use Excel via a published application.
What we have done so far:
- Per your suggestion, we added firewall rules (both inbound and outbound) for the two applications - the backgroundTaskHost.exe and brokerplugin.exe. This did not have any impact. So to be sure this wasn't the issue, we fully disabled the windows firewall and it still had no impact. Launching excel via RAS brought up the activation window, allowing me to enter the email address, and then excel locked up and had to be manually killed on the RDSH by an admin.
- Per articles related to Citrix and this situation, we published the BrokerPlugin app. This had no impact.
- Per the linked article about disabling ADAL/WAM, we did the following:
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- we manually added the registry keys to the existing user's profile (HKCU) for disabling ADAL/WAM. This did not work, again resulting in a locked up excel after entering the email address.
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- we added a Group Policy for these registry keys, deleted the user's profile on the RDSH, forced the gpupdate on the RDSH, and rebooted the RDSH for good measure. This did not work but DID have a slight change in behavior in that it skipped past the password dialog completely... so it asked for the email address and then asked for my preferences about sharing usage data with Microsoft. After finishing that dialog sequence, Excel was open but not activated, showing the "unlicensed" message and unable to do anything. But I could close Excel, as it was not locked up at this point.
- Finally, I did all of the above at the same time. And the only result was the same as when I removed the existing profile for the user and had the registry keys added via GPO - Excel no longer locks up, but does not ever present the password screen to allow for activation.
As I mentioned in the OP, if a user logs into the VM directly and launches excel there, the password screen does appear and the activation succeeds. But I cannot allow direct RDP access to dozens of RDSH VMs for hundreds of users, just so they can activate Excel. Do you have any other ideas for how to work around this bug in the office activation process?