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How To Configure Office 365 Updates in SCCM

February 5, 2021

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus follows a similar servicing procedure as Windows 10 and MEMCM (SCCM).

These updates align with the above products, and it crucial for you as an IT administrator to know how to handle this.

In this blog post, I cover what the Office 365 Client Updates are, some things to think about, and some bugs that I have seen.

Different Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus Update Channels

There are three update channels for Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus:

Monthly Channel
Semi-Annual Channel
Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)

Which update channel version the clients receive depends on which update channel (CDN) is configured.

Some things to note about Office 365 Client Updates

Office 365 Client Updates are not released at the same time as Windows Updates

A customer contacted me the other day because SCCM did not release their Office 365 client updates in time.

Their configuration was one Automatic Deployment Rule (ADR) for all client updates, with the following configuration:

Date Released or Revised: Last 1 day
Office 365 client updates enabled
Evaluation schedule: Every Second Tuesday at 23:55

This is a fine setup except for the following scenarios:

Out of band patches are not included
Windows Defender Definitions in SCCM will not be up to date as they are released more frequently

Software Updates released by Microsoft are generally released on Patch Tuesday, which occurs every Second Tuesday of each month at 10 AM Los Angeles time.

Living in Sweden, this should be around 7 PM.

Looking at the Windows Updates, we can see Microsoft released all of them at 7 PM.

Office 365 client updates, however, do not follow this timing, as you can see in the below picture:

The configuration’s effect was that the latest Office 365 patches were not included when SCCM evaluated the ADR .

Office 365 Client Updates are large

Every update channel contains its separate Data folder for Office 365 Client Update.

Since this folder is over 1 GB in size, it makes sense to split up the Deployment Packages used for Software Updates and use one Deployment Package per channel.

Then you will need to clean these Deployment Packages of superseded and expired updates continuously.

Scconfigmgr.com has provided a console extension for handling this that I frequently use.

Known bugs for Office 365 Client Updates in SCCM

A bug that I have seen with Office 365 Client Updates in SCCM is that not all data is downloaded when using multiple languages of Office 365 ProPlus. The solution to this problem seems to be to download the required updates to the Deployment Package manually.

Solution

There are several ways to handle this.

Increase the evaluation frequency of your Automatic Deployment Rule if you are only using one to handle client updates.
Create a separate Automatic Deployment Rule for Office 365 Client Updates.

References

For more information about the issues regarding timezones and ADRs, please refer to the following link: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/scott/2016/08/10/scheduling-software-updates-to-run-on-patch-tuesday/.

Updates related to Automatic Deployment Rules in System Center Configuration Manager Technical Preview 1801: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/get-started/capabilities-in-technical-preview-1801

Overview of Update Channels for Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-of-update-channels-for-office-365-proplus