Microsoft has announced that as part of a new update to the customisation tool in Office 365, organisations will be empowered to save configuration files within the data centres of the American multinational’s cloud facility, so they can access them later.
IT professionals will be given the capability to not only create, but edit and gain access to personal deployment configurations at the single location of their Microsoft 365 tenant. According to the company, users will no longer need to remember precisely where every single file is being stored, as they will be able to recall the configuration data easily for modification when needed.
A useful component of the web portal for client configuration services, the Office Customisation Tool was added in 2017. The tool is utilised for applying customisation to Office 365 products, particularly ones that make use of Click to Run technology for streaming updates from Microsoft, like Office ProPlus with the configurations saved out in an XML format.
Increased options and capabilities
A brand new signing-in option has now been added to the Office 365 portal for the Client Configuration Services. Desktop-based analytics admins, security admins and global admins will now be empowered to use the portal Office Customisation options. IT professionals with required privileges will be able to access and view the portal interface for Office Customisation and view all Office configurations created. Additional capabilities for such users include downloading associated XML files and uploading them to the Microsoft cloud.
The interface offers IT professionals the option to copy configuration files. Original data can be renamed and also modified if required after copying. Additionally, a selectable option called Get Link allows them direct access via a link to individual XML configuration files being stored within Microsoft’s servers. In the company’s language these links are referred to as Anonymous URLs. While these links can be used in code, users are advised to put the anonymous URL within quotation marks.
An example of this in practice is copying and pasting the anonymous URL inside the required command-line interface for the MDT (Microsoft Deployment Tool) in order to select specific configurations for Office 365. After this has been completed successfully, there will be no further requirement to nominate downloading the specific configuration file within the code.
Microsoft has announced an update for the MDT will be available soon, which will allow IT professionals the ability to use it in conjunction with anonymous URLs. Currently, these are not supported by the Office Deployment Tool in its current version, but it will soon be updated to accommodate them.
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