The DOI, in working to support USGS and other Bureaus, has agreed that the Semi-Annual Channel will be the single supported update channel of Office 365 as it is the default update channel for Office 365 ProPlus.
Currently, Office 365 has been installed in several different ways which would require different update channels. A change has been made in the DOI Default policy in MECM to enable Office 365 clients to receive updates from Configuration Manager. In order to allow the updates to change the channel of all current installs to Semi-Annual, the addition of a registry key is needed on all Windows systems. The following registry key has been added to the DI – O365 Semi-Annual Channel Registry Key GPO, which will be linked to the regional and science center OU levels the first week of February.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration\CDNBaseUrl
Semi-Annual Channel
(formerly Deferred Channel):
CDNBaseUrl = http://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/7ffbc6bf-bc32-4f92-8982-f9dd17fd3114
The current MECM applications will have a base install that removes all old Office installs, including Project and Visio, and installs the full semi-annual channel version of click-to-run Office 365 apps.
The ePatching team will begin patching all Office 365 installs in the environment starting with the February 2018 ePatching cycle using MECM to reduce the size of patches applied to systems in the environment. Software updates groups have been created by DOI with a naming convention starting with DOI-O365. The new semi-annual channel builds are showing up in MECM under \Software Library\Overview\Office 365 Client Management\Office 365 Updates and will be added to the DOI Software update groups monthly.
The update builds will appear in MECM Software Center as available patches during the normal ePatching process.
Questions about patching can be directed to the ePatching team through the Service Desk.