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Automox Q&A

Upgrading Office clients from 32bit to 64bit

jesumyip
May 15, 2020 at 1:45 am UTC

Has anyone put together a working approach for doing this via Automox? I’ve got Windows 10 machines deployed with Office 365 Pro Plus in 32-bit, and I would like to move that to 64-bit.

I understand the general approach is to uninstall all traces of Office 32-bit and then reinstall Office 64-bit. I also know you cannot mix Office 64-bit with Visio/Project 32bit (and Visio / Project are not in the suite of apps for Office). So I’m willing to ignore those machines and handle them manually.

I’ve also done some research into this https://psappdeploytoolkit.com/ that looks like it will do the trick. However, I have concerns about having this running in the user-context so that UI prompts are interactive.

Basically I’m looking to save a ton of work if someone has already built an approach for doing this.

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Replies (5)

Nic-AutomoxMay 15, 2020
#1

I haven’t heard of anyone doing that yet, but I’ll ask around.

The worklets run as System, but we do have a code workaround so that you can execute scripts as the current user, if need be. I use that trick in this worklet: Worklet: open website on end user's computer

Looks like Microsoft has an uninstaller tool you can run:

You could kick that off via worklet, then run the installer for the 64-bit version, I would think.

AdamW-AutomoxMay 15, 2020
#2

I don’t believe there is an upgrade path from a 32-bit arch, to a 64-bit arch. The way I would handle this is create a Worklet that firsts uninstalls the 32-bit app, and then installs the 64-bit one.

Thanks

jesumyipMay 20, 2020
#3

After considering all the risks involved, I’ve decided to do this manually. Too many things can go wrong with this. 🙂

Chris_2.0May 26, 2020
#4

Microsoft solved this with a MigrateArch attribute

jesumyipJune 1, 2020
#5

Yeah, I came across that. It’s got a bunch of pre-requisites though and the computers I am managing don’t all meet those requirements.

Thanks!

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