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SCCM

Unable to license Office 365 ProPlus

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I don’t know quite how widespread this issue is but it’s something I have had some trouble with on and off since I updated my OS to Server 2019 last year. That said, I’m not saying this is an issue limited to this OS; indeed I have seen it on other OS’s too.

The issue is this : Word will ask you to sign in and after entering your email address, it will freeze for 5 minutes before returning you to the (unlicensed) state you were previously in. Similar with Outlook – you enter your email address and the white password box appears but appear blank and freezes for 5 mins before returning you to the previous (unlicensed) state.

There are a number of things that you might try (including full uninstall/reinstall in desperate cases) but I’ll show you a couple of things you should try before doing this (or calling Microsoft, as they will ask you to do this too, more likely than not).

First – Remove previous license information

  1. Open C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16
  2. From a cmd prompt, type cscript .\OSPP.VBS /dstatus
  3. This will give you a list of previous license keys used. Remove all these using cscript ospp.vbs /unpkey:<5 digit code>

Second – (if the above doesn’t work) Disable Modern Authentication.

Open up regedit and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity

Add a new DWORD value called EnableADAL with a value of 0.

Open up Outlook and it should now present you with a password window you can actually use. Word/Excel etc should open up as expected.

For a little more info on Modern Authentication in Office 365 see here.

SCCM

Phased deployments not deploying

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AKA…

Exception: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: objectID
at Microsoft.ConfigurationManager.PhasedDeployment.Application.Deploy(IDatabaseOperation databaseOperation, List`1 phases, String phasedDeploymentID, String objectID)
at Microsoft.ConfigurationManager.PhasedDeployment.PODRuleEngine.EvaluatePhasedDeployments(SqlConnection connection)

    I was testing a phased deployment the other day and couldn’t get it to work for the life of me. Although the phased deployment appeared under the Phased Deployments tab for the Office 365 application I was targeting, a corresponding deployment didn’t appear for the phase 1 collection under the Deployments tab.

    I took a look at the SMS_PhasedDeployments.log on the site server and all I could see was the error message above. I would also see it repeat about every 2 minutes as below.

    It kept mentioning there were two phased deployments it was trying to evaluate, but there were no other phased deployments set. There is a well-known bug when a task sequence can get locked and the admin will typically go into the db and remove the offending ID locking the task sequence from the database. Well it turns out this is a similar issue with an equally similar solution.

    SOLUTION:

    1. Go into the ConfigMgr (sorry, Endpoint Manager!) DB and find dbo.PhasedDeployment, right-click the table and click Select Top 1000 rows.
    2. Identify the offending Phased Deployment from the list and copy the PhasedDeploymentID.
    3. Click New Query from the toolbar and type:

    DELETE FROM dbo.PhasedDeployment WHERE PhasedDeploymentID='<PhasedDeploymentID>'

    I would be inclined to delete and recreate your original phased deployment (from the console!) to be sure of a clean deployment but technically you be good from here on.