Hi,

I need to understand the lifecycle of activation within office 365, here's the reason why.  On numerous occassions now we have gone out to clients site with laptops that have office 365 installed, when we arrive at clients site we are offline,  office then asks for us to activate office 365 to confirm the license is still valid.

Why is it doing this when the laptop in question has been connected to the internet basically every single day prior to the offsite customer visit?  I'm kind of hoping the answer isn't "office waits 30 days before checking again, in 29 of them it was connected to the internet but of day 30 we were offsite so it performs a check then".

thank you in advance for any support / guidance offered.

regards

Simon

You can be offline when using the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other programs that are part of your Office 365 subscription. In a word, Office 365 support working in a number of ways. However, to maintain activation of your Office programs, you must connect to the Internet at least once a month. Your Office programs will prompt you to go online when the monthly period is nearly up.

• Marked as answer by Melon Chen CHNMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Sunday, March 09, 2014 3:18 PM

As an addition: we make use of the shared activation ability of O365 and I'm wondering if this might be effecting the activation sequence...

Shared Computer Licensing (Shared Computer Activation) requires frequent contact with the Online Licensing Service @ MSFT - every couple of days is what MSFT say.

The 30 day cycle does not apply to Shared Computer Licensing, is implied/inferred, I guess.

Some info is here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782859.aspx

Thanks for the info Don. I guessed that this was the case.

Now I need to find a way to make it work for us...

Some information then:

This is a high school where students and staff use desktops and laptops interchangeably. Which makes the Shared Computer license ideal for us. However, staff and some students do take laptops offsite, and offline. And this is where the first problem comes in: the license requires an almost permanent connection to activate. There is no saving of the license even for 1 day.

How can this be altered or improved so that my users have the offsite/offline option without reinstalling Office 365 with a personal license?

Secondly: What are the ports\urls that O365 requires for activation?

I have had a look around but have been unable to find what are the current settings. I want these to open up the firewall for O365.

Hi Jeff, sorry but your answer is not an answer to his question.

I have experienced similar situations several times now and it is deeply frustrating! I go offsite after been online and connected for a long period and during multiple logon and start up cycles with O365. But the moment I go offline, O365 goes into reduced functionality mode! During one of my tests I activated O365 while it was in this mode, restarted O365 to confirm license activated, disconnected and restarted... and next O365 session was in reduced functionality mode again!!!

According to https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg982959.aspx we should have 30 days to activate O365, but in practice this is not the case!

As an addition: we make use of the shared activation ability of O365 and I'm wondering if this might be effecting the activation sequence...

Any info for resolution would be greatly appreciated!

How can this be altered or improved so that my users have the offsite/offline option without reinstalling Office 365 with a personal license?

For permanently-offline/isolated scenarios, MSFT recommend Office2013 instead of Office365ProPlus.
But, there is a mention of "deploy Office365ProPlus with a product key":
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782859.aspx
I've no idea what type of product key would suit this scenario, perhaps a VL MAK product key?

Secondly: What are the ports\urls that O365 requires for activation?

I have had a look around but have been unable to find what are the current settings. I want these to open up the firewall for O365.

https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Office-365-URLs-and-IP-address-ranges-8548a211-3fe7-47cb-abb1-355ea5aa88a2?ui=en-US&rs=en-AU&ad=AU

Update:

Either I am getting two contradictory statements from O365 or...I am not sure.

Looking at (%localappdata%\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Licensing) I can find a current licensing token there. Good I want this. However, running the OSPP.vbs /dstatus script indicates that there is NO license installed for O365.

Running the program and looking at the about page indicates  a local license WHILE THE MACHINE IS CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Removing the internet connection and restarting O365 puts O365 into reduced mode at once.

So a modified question: why is no local license key been assigned to the computer? Any suggestions?

• Edited by ABAdmin 20 hours 2 minutes ago

Update:

Either I am getting two contradictory statements from O365 or...I am not sure.

Looking at (%localappdata%\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Licensing) I can find a current licensing token there. Good I want this. However, running the OSPP.vbs /dstatus script indicates that there is NO license installed for O365.

Running the program and looking at the about page indicates  a local license WHILE THE MACHINE IS CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Removing the internet connection and restarting O365 puts O365 into reduced mode at once.

So a modified question: why is no local license key been assigned to the computer? Any suggestions?

I'm not using SCA myself, so haven't got first-hand experience with it.
I'll take a guess that ospp.vbs might not be useful in an SCA scenario?
When you mention Internet connection, might that be connecting in some way with your tenant, or on your network to some other form of licensing service like ADFS or ADBA? (doubtful..)

It may be worth you checking on the O365 community forum for this SCA aspect (wiki + forums).
You can, as an O365 tenant, raise a support case, to get some help from MSFT.
In the O365 community forum, the MSFT people there can also private-message you for further help.

https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/