Install Office 365 in a Remote Desktop Services Environment

Office 365 Logo

Once you deploy Remote Desktop Services (RDS) for employee remote access, your next step will be to install user applications as well as all your line of business applications.

One of the most widely used applications suite is Microsoft Office, particularly Microsoft Office 365.

In order to deploy Microsoft Office 365 in a Remote Desktop Services environment, a number of requirements must be met. There is also special instructions which must be followed to properly deploy it.

This information also applies when you want to install Office 365 / Microsoft 365 to a shared virtual machine or a golden image for VDI (for VDI you can read my full guide “Deploy, Install, and Configure Microsoft Office 365 in a VDI Environment“).

After reading and completing the steps in this blog post and deploying Office 365, you can head over to my guide on how to Configure Office 365 in a Remote Desktop Services Environment using GPOs to pre-configure Microsoft Office and it’s applications for when your users log in.

What’s required

To deploy Microsoft Office 365 on a Remote Desktop Services Server, you’ll need:

Licensing

Special attention must be paid to licensing. In order to properly license and activate Office 365, you’ll need one of the following products that supports Shared Computer Activation:

All 4 of these products include and support “Shared Computer Activation“.

Microsoft 365 Standard, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Premium, and Office 365 Business Essentials cannot be used as they do not include or support Shared Computer Activation.

An exception is made for Microsoft 365 Business Premium which actually includes Microsoft 365 Apps for Business, but doesn’t support enabling “Shared Computer Activation” via Group Policy Objects and must be done using the XML configuration file method.

Installing Office 365

Once you have the proper licensing and you’re ready to proceed, you can start!

  1. First you’ll need to download the Office Deployment Tool from this link: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=626065. You save this wherever.
  2. Create a directory that you can work in and store the Office 365 installation files.
  3. Open the file you downloaded from the Microsoft Download site, extract the files in to the working directory you created in step 2.
  4. Open a Command Prompt, and change in to that working directory.
  5. We’re now going to run the tool and download the x64 image using the xml that was extracted by running the following command:

setup.exe /download configuration-Office365-x64.xml
setup.exe /configure configuration-Office365-x64.xml

Office 365 should now install silently, and then afterwards you should be good to go!

When a user logs in for the first time it will ask them to activate on their account. The user must have a license attached to their Office 365 account.

You are now ready to proceed to Configure Office 365 in a Remote Desktop Services environment, so that everything is configured and ready to use when your users log in.