Install Office 2016 OEM without Live account

I totally agree too.  **** me off.   Microsoft, you are not google or apple which is a great thing-those guys are clowns in technology world and why we use you until you start with this **** of tying in corporate clients to random Microsoft accounts to enable licenses.  Are you kidding guys? Stay corporate focused on corporate products and stop it.   I have over 100 clients in my company portfolio with about 2000 computers to support, this is now going to add another layer of **** for ****'s sake.   After 25 years, I may actually break the tie and start having my users go with open office for next round of deployments.

Would it make sense for us to begin using Volume Licensing for each of our clients from now on?  A quick Google search shows Office 2016 Standard Volume Licenses for as low as $225, including Software Assurance.  That is a little more than what we pay for 2016 Home and Business, but it does have SA for a year.  No need to keep paying for SA after the first year, so the cost is about the same.  Thoughts?

I'm the IT manager for a small business and ran into this issue today with a new Dell Precision T5810 with Office 2016 Professional which I purchased for my firm. Here's what I did after reading through this thread:

On the start menu (this is Windows 10 pro) I went to All Apps and clicked Microsoft Office.

This brought up a "try, buy, or activate" window so I clicked activate.

I was then prompted to enter the key, so I entered the key and clicked continue.

This brought me to an "Add this key to an account" window where I clicked the only option, "Redeem Online."

That opened login.live.com in Internet Explorer. I clicked the "Sign up now" link, then on the "Create account" page I clicked "get a new email address."

For the new address I use the machine's Dell service tag as the new outlook.com address and for the password I used ESC followed by the machine's Dell Express Service Code.

Then I entered the model number and service tag as first and last name and set my language preference.

That took me straight to a stores.office.com/myaccount page where there was a big orange install button which did what you'd expect it to do.

So in summary, I created a new outlook.com email address using ID info unique to the computer and created a new MS Live account using that email address so I could associate the machine's Office license with the newly created account. That's the best workaround I could come up with on short notice for this convoluted activation mess. So far it seems to be working.

I am actually considering using OP/VLS for my clients. But in some cases, they need only one or two of these. And if you are talking Office Pro, I see that with my supplier, at least, the price spread between retail and VLS is quite substantial.

And at that, if you intend to manage each customer's VLS under their own ID, it will solve the problem of limited numbers of activations per Live account but not the problem of a Live account. In fact, at that point, you would need to set up not only a Live account but go through the MS licensing site with a separate logon for each of your clients. And what happens when you need to validate the logon, and it sends the validation e-mail to your client, whose e-mail you cannot access.

Or you can just run them under your own VLS and try to keep them all separate. But that can be an issue if you ever part company with a customer.

I think I see Microsoft's dilemma here (regarding effective anti-piracy measures), but the Live account solution for such a ubiquitous application as MS Office has turned this whole thing into somewhat of an anti-customer measure. Not sure there is any good answer, but it is clear that the current one is very problematic.

Stepping back from this individual issue (Office activation), though, I do see that this is not the first time, by a long ways, that MS has entirely miscalculated (or simply did not care about) the effect of a change on the thousands, if not millions, of previously enthusiastic Microsoft-supporting IT professionals that support more than one small business client.

Yes, you do have to be careful about price comparisons between volume and other license types.

If you only need 1 or 2 volume licenses, there is actually a legal way of making the required minimum 5 count.  The 5 count is ANY MS licenses, not necessarily all the same.  So, search the volume list for the cheapest product they have.  At one time it was a mapping tool that sold for $8, so you just had to buy as many of those as you needed to make the initial 5 count.

Discount- Microsoft Open License Basics - The $8 way into Microsoft Volume Licensing

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2010/03/18/microsoft-open-license-basics-the-8-way-into-microsoft-volume-licensing.aspx