Q. I'm using the Office Deployment Tool to download Office 365 click-to-run and create an App-V package for deployment through SCCM, what is the easiest way to keep it updated?
A. This is actually a very simple process. Using the Office Deployment Tool the bits for Office 365 click-to-run can be downloaded and then an App-V 5 package created which can be loaded into SCCM. I detail this at http://windowsitpro.com/configuration-manager/deploy-office-365-click-run-using-configuration-manager. Each month this click-to-run is updated on Microsoft's servers but how do you deploy this on-premises? It is not likely you want your corporate machines deployed using the App-V 5 package to pull the update from Microsoft directly and so the automatic update option would have been disabled. There are therefore two options:
- Load the existing App-V package into the sequencer, perform the update to the latest version via update in Office 365 and save a new version which can be imported into SCCM, or...
- Use the Office Deployment Tool again to create a new App-V 5 version of the application and load into SCCM as a new version.
Both options are valid however option 1 has additional work whereas option 2 is very simple. Each time the Office Deployment Tool is used the output App-V package will have the same package GUID with only a different version. This means clients will only get the delta changes and is very simple for the IT administrators to manage.
