Servicing Profiles for Microsoft 365 Apps

-
 
Source: Microsoft

If you are deploying and managing Microsoft 365 Apps at an enterprise level, then you should consider implementing a security update policy as well. One can achieve this through many ways depending on the management tool you are using, but in the world of cloud management, organizations will typically deploy and manage Microsoft 365 apps using Intune. However, for greater control, Microsoft has provided a feature called Servicing Profiles which is available through Microsoft 365 admin portal.

What are Servicing Profiles?

Servicing Profiles lets you automatically deliver monthly Office updates under Monthly Enterprise Channel beginning the second Tuesday of every month. The Monthly Enterprise channel with its delivery cadence of performance and quality updates is the recommended default channel for most organizations.

Updates can be targeted to users or groups and can be delivered in waves to limit the impact on the network. One can also set deadlines for the updates to be installed and configure exclusion windows for disallowing installation of updates.

There are some pre-requisites for using this feature -

- Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise or Microsoft 365 Apps for business, Version 2008 or later
- A version of Windows 11 or Windows 10 supported by Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise or by Microsoft 365 Apps for business.
- Microsoft 365 (or Office 365) for Business Standard, Business Premium, A3, A5, E3, or E5 subscription plan
- Global administrator, security administrator, or Office apps administrator role to  use the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.
-To apply a servicing profile to a device, that device must be part of the inventory in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center
-Client devices can reach the following endpoints:
--https://login.live.com
--https://*.config.office.com
--https://*.config.office.net

How to configure a Servicing Profile? (The good stuff..)

1. Navigate to the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, choose Servicing in the left-hand navigation, and then choose Monthly Enterprise. Click on Get started -> Next





2. Select all eligible devices in the tenant or you can also select to specific groups.


3. You can also enable 'Use additional criteria to select devices for the servicing profile' to exclude specific groups, target channels for auto move to Monthly Enterprise, set a disk space limiter, exclude devices for macros and add-ins as well.


4. Configure rollout waves if needed. I am choosing not to.

5. Add an exclusion window if needed.

6. Set a custom deadline for installation of updates after the release or use the default.


The Servicing Profiles will be applied on eligible devices within 2 hours. After which the configuration for Microsoft 365 Apps will get updated to reflect the Monthly Enterprise channel (http://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/55336b82-a18d-4dd6-b5f6-9e5095c314a6). 


You can find the values for other channels over here.

The updates will apply at the next evaluation cycle based on the trigger schedule of the Office Automatic Updates 2.0 task.



The best part of using Servicing Profiles is that you can track the progress of the updates along with any issues that may arise.




Final thoughts..

In addition to the tracking, the other good thing about Servicing Profiles is that you can pause updates or even rollback to a previous version for specific devices if need be. This is particularly important in situations when dealing with cohort power users in an organization.

Also, it is important to note that Servicing Profiles will take precedence over existing settings related to Microsoft 365 Apps updates. Example - Settings created through the Office Deployment Tool in form of an xml and\or policies applied through Microsoft Intune's configuration profiles. However, Servicing Profiles will not prevent management solutions from reinstalling the Microsoft 365 Apps with a different update channel. Therefore, if you intend to use Servicing Profiles with Microsoft Intune, then make sure that the update channel in the Microsoft 365 Apps app is set to Monthly Enterprise Channel for targeted devices. Otherwise Intune will trigger reinstalls of the Microsoft 365 Apps in order to restore the update channel selected in the app configuration. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to force escrowing of BitLocker recovery keys using Intune

-
Image
Every now and then it so happens that BitLocker recovery keys do not escrow in AAD. The usual culprits are incorrect BitLocker policies and\or the device hardware configuration failing to meet the minimum requirements. The other scenario and something I recently experienced is when everything is setup right and still the recovery key doesn’t escrow in AAD. As I understand, this can happen if the escrow process got interrupted the first time due to network or local devices related issues and the process could not resume. To circumvent this issue, one can simply push a PowerShell script to the devices to force the escrow of the recovery keys to AAD. Here is a script to do so. try{ $BitlockerVol = Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint $env:SystemDrive         $KPID=""         foreach($KP in $BitlockerVol.KeyProtector){             if($KP.KeyProtectorType -eq "RecoveryPassword"){                 $KPID=$KP.KeyProtectorId                 break;             }         }        $o
Read more

Intune: Configure Printers for Non-Administrative Users

-
Image
Configuring printers for end users or giving them the ability to do it themselves is a normal requirement for organizations. Now if your users are Administrators, then the configuration can be straight forward, but in case of Non-Administrators there are additional steps required as Non-Administrators will not be able to add a driver in the driver store despite being able to install a printer. In this blog, I will cover the steps that I took to address this requirement using Intune. The setup involves 2 steps -  1. Setup registries. 2. Install the driver and configure the printer Setting up registries – The registries that need to be configured are actually part of a GPO setting – Allow non-administrators to install drivers for these device setup classes It can be found under: Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Driver Installation I used a Powershell script to set the values and wrapped it in a Win32 application. $Path1
Read more

Prevent users from running certain programs or applications on Windows endpoints using Intune

-
Image
  When it comes to blocking or preventing users from running an application on Windows devices, one normally uses App locker policy, Windows Defender Application Control and not so new but pretty useful method called Defender Vulnerability management within Microsoft 365 Defender Portal. A recent question on the Tech Community Microsoft forum prompted me to look for all possible alternatives. I started reminiscing over the legacy GPO policies and that is when I stumbled upon the policy  Don’t run specified Windows applications  located under User Administrative Templates - The policy setting does come with its own caveat - " This policy setting only prevents users from running programs that are started by the File Explorer process. It does not prevent users from running programs, such as Task Manager, which are started by the system process or by other processes. Also, if users have access to the command prompt (Cmd.exe), this policy setting does not prevent them from starting pr
Read more