In the process of learning how to use the Office deployment toolkit, I found many websites that had parts of the process documented. However, it seemed they never quite had a full documentation process. I will show you from start to finish on how to deploy Office 2016 from a network location.

Step One: Let’s download the Office Deployment toolkit for Office 2016. Once you have the tool downloaded, extract the files to your desktop. You will see two files, a setup.exe file and a configuration.xml file. The configuration.xml file will need edited and will not work out-of-box. I would recommend deleting the configuarion.xml file and starting  with a new one.

During my research, I found an awesome site that helps you create an XML file for Office deployment. This is the site URL: http://officedev.github.io/Office-IT-Pro-Deployment-Scripts/XmlEditor.html . The site should look similar to this.

At this website, you will create the XML file. This process is pretty self-explantory. Select the version of Office you want along with any other customizations. When you are finished customizing you XML file , click Export. Once the file is exported, rename the file to download.xml. Technically, you can name this file anything you want, but it will help to keep the deployment orderly.

Step Two: Create your network folder and map a drive on your computer to this folder. If you need help mapping your network drive you can find information here. Now copy download.xml and the setup.exe file into your shared network folder. Open a command prompt, and type the following command to download Office from Microsoft’s CDN.

Change your directory to your network drive, in my situation is was just R:

Next type setup.exe /download download.xml .

Unfortunately, you won’t get a status with how far along your Office download is. I can give you a couple tips. First, no warning or error boxes will pop-up if you typed your command correctly. Second, you will see a blinking blank below your command – this means Office is downloading. Third, you can go to your network drive and see if the Office folders are there. You should see the Office folder almost instantly after you execute this command

It will take a little while to download the Office files. Typically, on a 100mbps Internet connection, it takes 15 minutes to download.

While the Office is downloading, we need to create another xml file. This XML file will tell the computer how we want to install Office. Technically, you could just run the download.xml file with the configure switch instead of the download swtich. However, this approach will give you more flexibility going forward if you ever change the location where Office is stored. So let’s go to the Office 365 Configuration XML Editor site. Configure an XML file to point to where the download of Office 2016 is – along with your other customizations. This is what my configuration.xml file looks like. If you notice, it looks identical to my download.xml file. Everything stayed the same between my download.xml and configuration.xml since my download and install options didn’t change.

Lets check back in on our first command. If your Office finished downloading you will see the dash below your command like this. You can also check the download folder. It should have close to 10 files and 1.10GB of data.

Now we are ready to run the configure command to install Office 2016 on your network computers.

Copy your configuration.xml file into the same folder as the setup.exe and download.xml file. Open Command Prompt again and type the following command.

Change your directory to your network drive, in my situation is was just R:

Next type setup.exe /configure configuration.xml .

It may take a second or two and you will see the following pop-up.

Soon after that you will see the following box.

Yeah the installation completed successfully! Even for a small network this makes sense. The installation is way faster than if you install Office from the Office 365 portal.

That is all there really is to it. If I made something unclear or if you have more tips for me abou deploying Office 2016 I would love to hear your input.

This was posted by techspeeder. If this helped you please subscribe to my blog and follow me on Twitter.