Office 2016 For Mac Not Activating

Hey all, just had a recent problem with our OSX clients being unable to activate the latest Office 2016 suite with their Office 365 accounts. I had seen this problem before but there are so many other variables to look into when trying to fix sign in problems. Microsoft

Open any Office app, like Microsoft Word and in the What's New box that opens, select Get Started. On the Sign in to activate Office screen, select Sign in. Note: If you weren't prompted to sign in, open a blank file and go to File New from template Sign in. Enter the email address associated with Office for. Office 365 and Office 2016 are pretty much doing away with the Product key in favor of a user login. Each user will have 5 activations and as long as they have separate user profiles you can set this up once and as the use the Office applications they will be required to login at least once a month to keep it activated without login prompts.

Your first step should be the https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/ website which is good for determining most problems with your setup.

I thought this may have been an infrastructure problem where the ADFS 2.0 server was not updated with the latest Roll Up. Apparently that was not the case this time round.

Office 2016 Key Not Activating

Another problem would have been the time, but no problem there! Time was perfectly in sync.

Just having a wonder around and I found something that was interesting. Apparently Forms Based Authentication needed to be turned on for the intranet domain in ADFS 3.0. It was working perfectly well before but it looks like something had changed with how Office 2016 on Mac was trying to authenticate.

The problem is indicated with this error on the OSX client:

And these errors show up in the ADFS 3.0 logs:

Error AD FS 364
Encountered error during federation passive request.
Additional Data
Protocol Name:
wsfed
Relying Party:
urn:federation:MicrosoftOnline

Once you enable Forms Based Authentication for the Intranet this problem should disappear! Only minor problem with this is that it's not truly single sign on as you are still prompted for credentials inside the domain.
To enable Forms Based Authentication open your ADFS 3.0 server management console > Authentication Policies > Edit Global Settings then enable Forms Based Authentication for the Intranet,
Hope that helps :)
TLDR; Enabled Forms Based Authentication for the Intranet on the ADFS 3.0 management console.

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Note

Office 365 ProPlus is being renamed to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. For more information about this change, read this blog post.

Symptoms

When you try to activate or sign in to any of the Microsoft Office 2016 applications after you install the version 15.33 update, you receive a blank authentication screen. Additionally, you may see any of the following symptoms.

Symptom 1

The following issues occur in the Unified Logging Service (ULS) log:

The server has redirected to a non-https URL.
Errors occur in Azure Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) authentication.

To locate the ULS log, open Finder and browse to the following path:

~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.<Application>/Data/Library/Caches/Microsoft/uls/com.microsoft.<Application>/logs

Note <Application> represents the name of the application that you are troubleshooting.

Microsoft office for mac 2016 free download

Symptom 2

You notice that in an HTTP trace, the server response includes multiple WWW-Authenticate headers, such as the following:

WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate

WWW-Authenticate: NTLM

Cause

The symptoms occur for the following corresponding reasons:

Cause for symptom 1

Starting from Office 2016 for Mac version 15.33, unsecured endpoint traffic is blocked in authentication flows.

Microsoft Office For Mac 2016

Cause for symptom 2

Starting from Office 2016 for Mac version 15.33, the authentication method no longer selects NTLM authentication when multiple WWW-Authenticate headers are present in the response. The issue occurs when the selected authentication method is unsuccessful.

Resolution

Resolution for symptom 1

Configure all authentication endpoints to use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.

Resolution for symptom 2

Install the September 2017 update for Office 2016 for Mac version 15.38.

More Information

More information for symptom 1

Microsoft Office 2016 Mac Not Activating

The resolution applies when you use Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services or non-Microsoft federation solutions.