Office 365 ProPlus, Click-to-run and Add-ins

ProPlus, the new Professional Plus

Office 365 ProPlus offers a subscription based license for Office 2013 Desktop Software including Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you want Office 2013 at home, that’s your option. Enterprises can also buy the software outright like you may be used to be able to do for home use. That license model is called Office 2013 Professional Plus.

Here’s how Microsoft describes it in the ProPlus FAQ

Both Office Professional Plus 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus deliver the same application experiences. However, Office Professional Plus 2013 is a traditional Office installation that is tied to the computers it is installed on, and it is available through volume licensing only. A user-based service, Office 365 ProPlus is available as a subscription.- from

Click-to-Run

One other difference, besides license model, between ProPlus and Professional Plus is the default install technology. For ProPlus, the default is a method called Click-to-Run. For Professional Plus the default is what you may be used to, a Windows Installer Package. Again, here’s how Microsoft describes that difference

Office Professional Plus 2013 uses Windows Installer Package (MSI)-based installation. Office 365 ProPlus uses Click-to-Run installation and software update management. – from

On another page meant for IT Professionals in Businesses Microsoft states it another, very similar way:

Click-to-Run is an alternative to the traditional Windows Installer-based (MSI) method of installing and updating Office – Overview of Click-to-Run

Click-to-Run is meant to get the software started more quickly and keep you up to date. The traditional method requires that the full install completes before you can run Word and the others. The new technology “streams” the bits in the background similar to how YouTube streams a video so it can start playing immediately. It’s really a neat idea – streamed software!

Click-to-Run Office 365 ProPlus Only

The traditional MSI install may not be available to Office 365 ProPlus subscribers. Here’s part of a response to How do we Install Office 365 Pro Plus using MSI package? on the support forums:

Office 365 doesn’t provide the MSI installation package at present.

On the other hand it appears that Click-to-Run is not exclusive to Office 365 ProPlus. As described on the same Overview of Click-to-Run for IT Pros referred to above:

Click-to-Run is also available for the following retail products:

Office Professional 2013

However, I’m not 100% sure this document is correct. First of all, it states “Office Professional 2013″ which is a slight variation on the “Office Professional Plus 2013″ product name used on office.microsoft.com.

Add-in Support for Click-to-Run

Why do you care what install method is used? The end product you get is slightly different. According to Click-to-Run: Known issues:

Many add-ins might not function as expected when used with Click-to-Run. You might see error messages stating that an add-in failed to load or couldn’t be found.

How to Tell If You’re Running ProPlus

Not sure if you’re running Office 365 ProPlus or Office 2013 Professional Plus? Check the About box in your Office Client. Here’s what my About boxes look like in Word 2013 for the two different installation types.

Reference

Click-to-Run: Known issues, office.microsoft.com Support, retrieved 4/4/2014

Overview of Click-to-Run, Microsoft TechNet, publish date listed July 16, 2012

Office 365 ProPlus, office.microsoft.com Products, retrieved 4/4/2014

How do we Install Office 365 Pro Plus using MSI package?, microsoft Office 365 community forums, retreived 4/4/2014

Deployment methods for Office 2013, Microsoft TechNet, displayed publish date October 23, 2012

How To Check Your Version of Office 2013, groovypost.com, January 2013