Late last week Microsoft did soft launch/announcement via the Microsoft 365 Message Center that Microsoft 365 Business will include support and be licensed for Office Shared Computer Activation. This chips away at another one of the reasons why an SMB customer may have needed to go down the Microsoft 365 E3 path, and opens up some different usage scenarios and starts rolling out in mid-April.

The first of these scenarios is computers shared by multiple users with different user profiles, which is common for certain roles and industries, but I see the bigger inclusion for a broader range of customers and users is that support will be there for Remote Desktop Service and other VDI scenarios when this capability is available via updated click to run bits..

This won’t something we see enabled by default in the Office deployment capabilities of the Microsoft 365 Business Admin Center (admin.microsoft.com), so that means jumping in an using Intune capabilities either via the Azure Portal or via devicemanagement.microsoft.com. Take a look at what you can do with Office C2R deployments with Intune. If you haven’t seen my previous posts on what you might want to consider with C2R deployments, take a look at the following posts

How Do Recent Microsoft 365 Announcements affect Microsoft 365 Business? – Part 2 Office 365 Business Deployment

How Do Recent Microsoft 365 Announcements affect Microsoft 365 Business? – Part 3 Office 365 Business vs. Office 365 ProPlus

Microsoft 365 Business Tech Series Videos – Office 365 Business Deployment

Shared Computer Activation on https://devicemanagement.microsoft.com

Two of the things to take note of in here is that first you will see references to Office 365 ProPlus, but you can still use this interface. The second is that when you deploy via this method, it will deploy ProPlus. This isn’t really a problem, as within a short time it will transform into Office 365 Business and show as activated. Give it a few minutes, I’ve seen this catch a few people out.

I’m sure we’ll get new details soon, as we haven’t seen an official announcement yet, but no doubt we’ll see more over at the SMB Blog over on Microsoft Tech Community. In the meantime, take a look at Overview of shared computer activation for Office 365 ProPlus which wlll definitely need some updating when this feature becomes available.