Office updates restarting app

Automox
#1

Hi there!
I’m (my users) facing a problem I don’t really find a good solution. Some of the updates of Microsoft Office involve restarting the app. Automox can notify users when a system is going to reboot. But seems to be no way to either stop restarting the app or notifying users in a proper way.
The most we can do (and this was the idea that Automox team told me) is to notify users that there is an Office update and that they have to be careful because maybe the applications shuts down.

As you can imaging, this is very important as this can result in loosing hours of work in a document.

Does anyone faced this problem? What ideas you suggest?

#2

Hello amj,
There is one more thing you could do as well within Automox. It would involve a bit more work and a second policy but what you could do is build a patch only policy built specifically to handle Office.
You would add the filter “Everything Office” and it would look like this

image
image1377×974 89.6 KB

Then you would change your primary policy to an Everything But policy and setup a filter to exclude “Everything Office”

You would still need to setup a notification that would warn users that the policy for Office is about to run but this would allow the policy that runs for Office to run much faster and the users can get back to using Office sooner.

2 Likes
#3

Yesterday a user complained about this. The workaround seems decent, but the problem in our case is that we have automatic (no approval needed) patching only for high/critical patches. For anything else we manually approve them. If we used this workaround, it would be back to automatic again for at least Office. I havn’t found a way to make a Manual Approval policy, but with a filtered list, like having a Patch Only policy, but with an approval needed option.

#4

Yes, this is exactly what I have now. I think the problem is more in the side of Microsoft, that it just restarts the application instead of warning the user…

#5

maybe, but I don’t recall any of the regular office automatic updates ever restarting the office apps without prompting first. Could be wrong though

#6

We’re experiencing this too. Happened to my CEO this morning before a board meeting. I’m eager to find a solution if anyone has one.