Today we are announcing a preview update to the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run, which provides desktop admins with a simple user interface to customize their deployment of Office.

With this update, you can now customize Office application settings as part of your configuration file, which means you can build a single configuration file that installs Office and configures preferences for Office applications.  You can search for Office application settings based on Office application, category, and title to quickly find the settings you’re interested in:

For this preview release, we’ve provided a limited set of Office application settings to choose from.  We plan to include the full set of application settings later this summer.

In addition to application settings, we have been listening to your feedback and since we introduced the Office Customization Tool for Click-to-Run we have made a few changes to the preview experience; adding Organization Name as a setting that is included as part of the deployment configuration, an update to the language selection experience, and an update to the Automatically accept the EULA option.

In our next update we plan to add many additional enhancements including; an update to the product selection experience to allow you to have more control over the products you can select from and the apps that you exclude, an update to the language selection experience including support for MatchOS, AllowCdnFallback, Proofing Tools and more.

Please try out the new application settings feature as well as the new enhancements and let us know what you think using the Send-a-Smile feature (button in the upper right-hand corner or this web page) — your feedback helps us plan future updates.

As always, make sure you download the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool (ODT) to enable this new feature during deployment.

Chris Hopkins

Senior Program Manager – Office Engineering