Integration with Microsoft Office 365

[AndrewPascal]

Anyone have any experience of migrating robots to Office 365? The requirement to sign in when first opening Office is hard to automate around. The intermittent requests to re-enter email address and password are even worse. Does anyone have any successful strategies? Have you tried Microsoft's RPA Unattended licence for O365?

Any suggestions gratefully received!

[nthnhwrdprmn]

@AndrewPascal We are about to embark on an upgrade of our bot VMs from Office 2016 to O365. We were advised by both Blue Prism support and Microsoft to install the unattended license version of O365 for the very reasons you brought up.

Once we have one bot VM upgraded with the unattended license version of O365 and have conducted some testing, I will try to report back here on our experience and results for the benefit of this community.

[AndrewPascal]

Thanks @nthnhwrdprmn. We investigated the O365 "RPA Unattended" licence, but we were still getting the sign-in dialogue. Microsoft support told us that was expected, which makes absolutely no sense to me. If you (or anyone) can get it working, I would dearly love to hear about it. Office 2016 end-of-life is getting painfully close!

[AndrewPascal · Accepted solution]

Well, in the end we've scrapped Office 365 and upgraded to Office 2024 instead. You can buy per-device licences, install them on a key management server and carry on using Office exactly as before. A bit late to be of help to most people (11 days to end of support now!), but that's the solution we found - and you might not have heard of it, because MS don't like to publicise the existence of non-365 versions of Office!

[nthnhwrdprmn]

I'm glad you found a solution that works for you. We did get Office 365 (full desktop Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, not web based) working, but it does require per-device licenses, and configuring registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Licensing\Unattended (DWORD) = 1 on each device (Resource PC). Hopefully this will be helpful to others who may have extended support for older versions of Office while they transition to newer supported versions.

[AndrewPascal]

That's interesting. Does this avoid having the robots sign into MS365, in your experience? We tried the Unattended RPA licence, but it still asked the robot to sign in, which defeated the point. (We were using the -unattended command-line switch rather than the registry setting.) Our Microsoft contact told us this was expected behaviour, which made us give up and go for Office 2024. If you got different results, it would be useful to figure out why and get that documented here on the forum for future reference.

[nthnhwrdprmn]

Each of our Bot VMs (Resource PCs) are assigned a unique AD account, and each account is assigned its own Office 365 unattended license. The assignment of licenses to these Bot VM AD accounts was done first, then the installs were performed while logged into each Bot VM with the assigned Bot VM AD account. After install, the registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Licensing\Unattended (DWORD) = 1 was configured on each, and then a restart of each Bot VM. After this our processes ran unattended without requiring any logic or UI/UX changes. Our IT followed the instructions prescribed by Microsoft here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/licensing-activation/overview-unattended.

[AndrewPascal]

Thanks for the comprehensive description of your setup. Hopefully, that will be of use to someone later on down the line. 
For completeness, the differences between your experience and ours were:

1. We don't have a one-to-one relationship between accounts and VMs
2. Our bot accounts don't have permission to install software, so Office 365 was packaged up and pushed to the relevant VMs
3. We tested using the command-line switch rather than the registry key (both solutions are in the link you shared earlier)

I don't know which one - or which combination - made our attempt fail while yours succeeded. (I'm also not planning to re-open that can of worms now that we have a working solution!) I'm just documenting what we've learned in case it helps someone else.