Microsoft Autoupdate Mac Required Data Notice
Version 4.13 of Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac, released on Tuesday, contains a new Required Data Notice that will pop up immediately upon installation and must be acknowledged before MAU will continue to function.
While the user experience is not great, thankfully Microsoft has provided us a way to suppress the new dialog on managed systems. Read on for the details.
Microsoft’s Diksha Mehta began warning us of this upcoming change related to the GDPR on the MacAdmins Slack back in June but it became obvious this week that many MacAdmins missed the warning. There was also confusion when Paul Bowden announced that further privacy related changes related to each application, with new warning dialogs and preferences keys, were pushed back to August**.
- Jul 19, 2019 Microsoft AutoUpdate's new Required Data Notice can be supressed with a simple addition to a configuration profile or a defaults write command.
- I had installed Microsoft Teams in the past, which I later uninstalled by dragging the app to the trash (after I first saw Stack Exchange Network Stack Exchange network consists of 175 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
Aug 31, 2019 To see a comprehensive list of applications installed on your Mac use (Apple menu) About This Mac System Report. Software Installations. The following Microsoft support community discussions may be of interest to you: Microsoft AutoUpdate with A Required Data Collection Notice. AutoUpdate - Microsoft Community. Microsoft AutoUpdate makes sure your copy of Office will always be up-to-date with the latest security fixes and improvements. If you are an Office 365 subscriber, you'll also receive the. Microsoft Office officially dropped support for macOS 10.12 Sierra last week with the release of the 16.31 updates. This came as no surprise to MacAdmins as the Office for Mac team announced the N-2 macOS support plan back on Sept. What did come as a surprise was a new Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) alert encouraging users to upgrade to macOS Catalina.
Microsoft Autoupdate Mac Required Data Notice Free
The new setting to disable the Required Data Notice, which to be effective will need to be applied to computers before MAU 4.13 is installed, can be set using a defaults write or a configuration profile.
Because the dialog needs to be acknowledged by all users on a computer a configuration profile will greatly simplify deployment and can be added into an existing profile for managing MAU settings.
Below is an example of a comprehensive configuration profile for managing all of MAU’s settings. Let me know if you have any questions or please join us in the #microsoft-autoupdate channel in the MacAdmins Slack for further discussion.
**Unfortunately we don’t have the exact details on these additional new preferences yet but do know that some controls such as the SendAllTelemetryEnabled kill switch is moving to a suite-wide setting in com.microsoft.office which will make managing them across all apps easier in the future.
UPDATE July 23, 2019: Rich Trouton has also written about this issue and has provided both a script that will set the preference on disk across all user folders as well as a configuration profile that manages only this single setting and no others in his post: Suppressing Microsoft AutoUpdate’s Required Data Notice screen
UPDATE July 24, 2019: I added this key to the open source ProfileCreator application.
UPDATE August 7, 2019: A new support document from Microsoft about upcoming changes in Office 16.28 includes additional details about the preference key discussed in this post. Importantly setting either option will suppress the dialog from appearing to your users.
Microsoft Autoupdate Mac Interface
In addition to the RequiredDataOnly string we knew about, the alternative option for the AcknowledgedDataCollectionPolicy key is RequiredAndOptionalData. The differences between Required and Optional data for Office are outlined in this support article.