Office 2016 DefaultsToLocalOpenSave setting change as of Office 2016 15.33.x

As part of the release of Office 2016 15.33.0, a number of managed preference options have been added and some have changed from what they were before. An example of one that has changed is the DefaultsToLocalOpenSave management setting, which sets the Open and Save options in Office 2016 apps to default to On My Mac instead of Online Locations.

In Microsoft Office 2016 15.32.x and earlier, the  DefaultsToLocalOpenSave setting could only be managed by running a command similar to the one below on the individual user accounts:

/usr/bin/defaults write "/path/to/user/homefolder/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/"com.microsoft.officeprefs DefaultsToLocalOpenSave -bool true

To set this for all accounts on a particular Mac, I had written the following script:

As of Microsoft Office 2016 15.33.x, this setting can now be set at the global level for all users by running the following command with root privileges:

/usr/bin/defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office DefaultsToLocalOpenSave -bool true

I’ve posted an updated script for manage this setting to GitHub, available via the link below:

https://github.com/rtrouton/rtrouton_scripts/tree/master/rtrouton_scripts/set_office_2016_default_save_option_to_on_my_mac

This setting can now also be managed with a profile, so I’ve created a .mobileconfig file and posted it here on Github:

https://github.com/rtrouton/profiles/tree/master/Office2016DefaultToLocalSave