Today I would like to share a method to remove the pre-installed Office 365 ProPlus suite from Microsoft Intune managed devices managed with you.

Scenario

Recently I’ve been deploying a lot of Surface Go’s with Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune in an environment where these devices are shared amongst firstline workers. Most of the firstline workers have an Office 365 F1 or Office 365 E1 license assigned, which do not include the Office Desktop apps, but instead offer the Office Mobile apps.

When we purchased these new Surface devices, or deployed the Surface recovery image to them, we noticed that the factory image already includes the Office 365 ProPlus Suite by default. This is probably the best fit for most organizations, especially when network bandwidth is limited, however for our users, which are not licensed to use these apps, it is confusing that the desktop apps are available on their machines.

Fortunately removing the pre-installed Office 365 ProPlus suite is as easy as deploying it with Microsoft Intune. Lucky for us a removal does not consume as much bandwidth as a deployment does. 🙂

Office Deployment Tool

With the web-based Office Customization Tool (OCT), we can configure the deployment settings for Office 365 ProPlus, and generate the XML data to deploy with Microsoft Intune.

However, the Office Customization Tool does not include all configuration options the Office Deployment Tool has, such as the Remove element. In that case I guess notepad works too. 🙂

With the XML data supplied above, you can remove the Office 365 ProPlus suite from devices managed with Microsoft Intune.

Configuring Microsoft Intune to remove Office 365 ProPlus from devices.

Let’s walk through the Microsoft Intune configuration now.

1. From the Microsoft 365 Device Management Portal, select Client Apps.
2. In the Client Apps blade that displays, select Apps.
3. Click + Add
4. In the App type drop-down menu, select Office 365 Suite: Windows 10.
5. Modify the Settings format to Enter XML data.
6. Configure the App Suite Information.
7. Enter the XML data provided in this blog post.
8. Add and assign the application to devices where the Office 365 ProPlus suite needs to be removed.

Wrapping Up

If you are also using Windows Autopilot. Using this deployment method to remove the Office 365 ProPlus suite will also allow you to track the removal during the Enrollment Status Page (from Windows 10, version 1809 and higher.)

Thanks for tuning in! If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me using the comments section below, or on Twitter @jseerden.