Errors with App Volumes 2.14 and Office AppStacks

[Kayleigh1]

I am still currently working with VMware about this issue, but I haven't gotten very far with them yet. The technician I am working with sent me documentation (that I've already looked at and tried; VMware Knowledge Base and VMware App Volumes Provisioning Recipe for Microsoft Office 365).

I am fairly new at the VDI Admin position (fair warning) so bear with me. I am trying to restructure the VDI environment as there are a few too many pools in my opinion and I feel like we could get it down to four or five pools rather than the 11 or 12 we have currently. Now, I have started to create new app stacks for our environment, we are running windows 7 currently (will be windows 10 by end of 2019) and have UEM 9.5, View Horizon Agent 7.6 also with the latest windows updates. The app volumes manager and agent are at version 2.14.2.11 and we currently have 7 different AppStacks that are all working and being used by our end users. I have tried multiple times to get Office 2016 ProPlus and Office 365 (O365 and O365 + Visio) to work in AppStacks. I have tried with the view horizon agent on the provisioning desktop and with out it on the provisioning desktop. I  have also tried taking the UEM off the provisioning desktop. I have tried 32 bit and 64 bit (would prefer 64 bit, but thought I'd try 32 bit anyways). Now, when I have tested the AppStacks on a windows 7 VM the users experience errors with the office applications.

If they are using the Office 2016 ProPlus AppStack then the users get an office activation popup and we can't get office to activate with our KMS server like it should. If the users have the O365 or the O365 + Visio AppStack then the users will get errors (like the one attached) when they attempt to do certain actions. Now, this doesn't happen to every user, but most of the users experience this error at some point. When they get the error it is normally when they are trying to 1. open an attached document in outlook and it is trying to open a different office application, 2. The user is trying to open a document from a SharePoint site we have or from our Success Factors, 3. The user is trying to open a document from their Online O365 Account, it will first open the online version of the application (i.e. Online Excel) and then when they click the option to open in Excel (the desktop application) the error occurs.

However, the strange thing is that I have started to setup the Windows 10 test VMs to prep everything for when we move to windows 10 next year and I created an O365 AppStack for windows 10 and it only is giving me an activation error, but everything else is working just fine. However, I haven't tested this with anyone in the business as we haven't pushed windows 10 to our VDI environment yet. Can anyone give me some suggestions on what I can try to get the errors resolved so that I can push these AppStacks?

[jmatz135]

If you want to Run Office and Visio I have had to make a Click-to-Run package for Microsoft Office.  Then use this to capture MS Office install in an appstack.  Then use it to create your Visio appstack just using a different config file to determine what packages are installed but from the same Click-to-Run package.  Then I can apply them together.

Licensing is the real issue here though.  If they both use volume licensing (KMS) or both use the O365 activation you should be good.  If the Office suite is O365 and the Visio is volume license I had to make the Office appstack on a clean VM and also make the Visio appstack on a clean VM (no Office installed).  This works, but there are some oddities like Visio attachments from Outlook won't open directly, so you need to save the attachment and then open.  Still trying to work that out.