Excel 365 Activation Signon - No Password Screen Displays

Question

I originally asked this question in the Office Install forum, but was redirected to ask it here.

I have a set of Azure-hosted VMs on which Excel has been installed via the Office Deployment Tool. The deployment was set up with SharedComputerLicensing enabled and this is running on a Windows 10 Enterprise (multi-user) OS (fully patched).

The only access users have is via a published RAS app - they do not have direct Remote Desktop access.

When Excel is started, it appropriately asks the user to sign in to activate the license. They enter their email address and then.... nothing happens. Excel locks up and cannot be closed. When I log into the VM directly and check, there are messages in the event log specifically saying Excel cannot be closed because a dialog is open. This, I assume, is the password entry screen that Excel is not presenting over RAS.

If I enable a given user to have direct RDP access to the VM, they can launch excel there and the authentication process works fine. It is only failing via a remote application. Enabling RDP on all these VMS for 270+ users is not going to be a viable option.

How can I get the password dialog to display?

I've Bing'd and googled and this issue seems to be common, but there does not seem to be a definitive answer. Disabling ADAL or WAM seems to be the most common solution, but it is specifically discouraged in numerous Microsoft articles. All of these articles identify the missing screen as a symptom, but do not provide a solution. I tried this anyway and it didn't work, so it is clearly not an actual solution, at least not 100% of the time. All it seemed to do for me was make it so that Excel didn't actually freeze - the user does not successfully authenticate and cannot actually use Excel, but they are at least able to close it.

Since most of the articles I found are older, I'm wondering if anyone has encountered and resolved this bug with excel more recently and if so would you please share the solution?

Thanks for your assistance.

Answer 1

I have found one more bit of information about this issue. @Emily Hua-MSFT , I don't know if you have the ability to find and update the internal tickets for these things, but if you do, this might be useful for the engineering team.

This problem of the excel activation not working over RAS seems to only occur if Microsoft is not the IdP for the authentication process.

In other words, if I attempt to use my hotmail account to activate Excel, it DOES show the password box. If I use my actual work account, which uses a different IdP, the password does not show and Excel locks up.

I've also found that this issue occurs when attempting to login/configure OneDrive in this environment - the password box does not show and the tool locks up unless I use an account that uses Microsoft as the IdP.

My RAS vendor says they are "working with Microsoft" on this, but that Microsoft is not being particularly proactive or helpful in terms of providing updates or workarounds to them either. The fact that this issue has had no resolution over several years is troubling.

Answer 2

I'm having same issue on a new bare-metal build. Locks up after clicking next with my email auto-filled. Dialog disappears but word is locked. I have 2FA enabled for my 365 account. I have not joined the machine to the domain yet (new domain controllers are going in soon with new domain name).

Answer 3

Is there anything Microsoft can do to assist with this issue? I've spoken with our RAS vendor, Parallels, and they state that they have reported this issue to Microsoft multiple times and Microsoft has acknowledged that it is a bug, but has not provided any workaround or solution. Is there a license key I can put in (until this is resolved) to allow users to do their jobs? Anything?

Answer 4

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:
• 1. 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.
• 2. 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?