As part of releasing Microsoft Office 2016 15.27, Microsoft has also updated Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) to include an interesting new feature: Automatically Download and Install. In MAU 3.8 and later, this feature will automatically download updates for Office 2016 applications and do the following:
- If an Office application is not running – Automatically install and update the application
- If an Office application is running – Prompt the customer and give them the option of updating later or restarting the application. If the customer chooses to restart their application, the application will be closed, updated and then re-opened
To enable the automated download and install option, open the Microsoft AutoUpdate application and set the Automatically Download and Install option.
For more information on this new feature, please see the following link:
What’s New in Microsoft AutoUpdate 3.8: http://macadmins.software/docs/MAU_38.pdf
To enable the automated download and install option via the command line for Microsoft AutoUpdate 3.8, the following defaults command can run by the logged-in user:
defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck AutomaticDownload
Microsoft is planning to move the MAU preferences to /Library/Preferences as part of an upcoming Microsoft AutoUpdate release, so the following defaults command can be run with root privileges to enable the automated download and install option for those future versions of Microsoft AutoUpdate:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck AutomaticDownload
For those who want to enable the automated download and install option using management profiles, I’ve created a .mobileconfig file and posted it here on Github:
