Install Office 2016 OEM without Live account

Yes, we've done this and you are only able to activate about 5 Office licenses with a single MS Account. In addition when you create a MS account you enter a specific email address and you can typically create 1 MS Accounts using that single email address. So You are forces to generate massive email number of email addresses at your site to continue to install Office. We've also ran into to weird stuff where MS accounts randomly do not work and think if has something to do with MS pinging the local machine, detecting the MAC address and noticing multiple MS accounts are links to that single MAC address that account then quits working.

Not come across that with those I've spoke to. I know of a couple that have about 15+ licenses on a single account, but there is a limit to how many can be activated.....I'll ask to see what the limit is though. That said, I've never come across any that have stopped working, you just cannot add any more licenses to the account.

One company has a single mailbox but has multiple aliases so its easier to manage from a mail side for the client. That said, it still results in multiple MS ID's which is far from simple and is a real pain to manage for either reseller or end user.

All of this seems to point to MS pushing towards a model of either Office 365 (monthly/annual) licenses or Volume Licenses. Shame really as the OEM route has been favoured by the SMB marketplace for a long time now but I can see how this would follow the new MS software model.

We're making it one account per machine, I mentioned it earlier in the chain of posts, naming convention is ******@outlook.com and a standard password. We don't change the PC names once they are on the domain so that's not an issue. What I have found with one I installed this week though is that the user is now having issues when trying to open a document from SharePoint online with his installed Office 2016, the users has a company account that he uses to sign in to SharePoint web - I've actually got a thread on the O365 community about that with someone from MS helping me out but no resolution yet. Whether this is related to the PC having different activation credentials is not something I have asked them yet

I've also read/heard that there is a limit of 5 licenses/account which is why we decided to use the 1 account / 1 PC method. It will also make it easier to reinstall the software if we ever need to

All of this seems to point to MS pushing towards a model of either Office 365 (monthly/annual) licenses or Volume Licenses.

Shame really as the OEM route has been favoured by the SMB marketplace for a long time now but I can see how this would follow the new MS software model.

It is no secret that MS prefers Office 365, and is doing everything it can to discourage 1-time payment license purchases. When 2013 was released, it was almost impossible to find the 1-time payment license on the MS Store site.  (It is easier on the 2016 version of the site.) There are multiple reasons.  CTR (at the root of 365) takes back control of applying updates to machines. 365 ties nicely into MS's dream of moving all computing into their "cloud" (and their control). And best of all for them, beyond the very short term, they make much more money with 365.

It appears there is a relatively new process that I've seen mentioned. Some computers come with a "free" 1 year subscription to Office 365. I've seen a few reports lately that people with this type of offer have an "Office" icon in the start menu or on the desktop.  When they click on it, they are prompted for an email account to activate the license. Apparently the product key is somehow associated with this icon.  Maybe some wise guy will figure out how to adapt it for 1-time payment licenses. That would make a lot of people happy.

MS has not published an "official" limit on number of licenses you can associate with a single account.  This other question in the forum Read this reply  says there is a limit of 30 licenses.

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Microsoft makes you register an email for Live account to activate Office & store your license keys in.  Each account can hold 30 license keys, and you can add more accounts by creating a different email address (doesn’t have to be a Microsoft email).  However - and this is the core problem identified by this thread - they don’t track the order, so you have to do that yourself - #1, #2, #3, #4, etc. - because when you install Office, it asks you for which number it is, not what license key it is (which is horribly stupid).  This is based on the time & date activated, so #1 would be the one you registered on Live last week, #2 would be the one you registered 3 days ago, and #3 would be the one you registered today.  They do not make that information visible, so it’s easy to create a big mess if you don’t track it.

</snip>

From comments I've read, creating a unique email account for each machine, based on the some form of machine ID, ie serial number, seems to be the easiest to work with. That is until you have to transfer the license to new hardware, due to "dead computer".

FYI: You should probably be asking this question in the business version of the forum:

You may want to ask this question in the “Office 365 for Business” Forum / Community

There is a “hidden”, aka separate, location to find out Office 365 for Business specific information and to ask questions:**Office 365 for business community**http://community.office365.com/en-us/default.aspx

You could also try joining MS’s  “Yammer” account: https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork/#/threads/company?type=general  There are a couple of “networks” where you may be able to get an answer, ie “Office 365 IT Pro” or “fasttrack deployment”.

Chris:

Yes, I expect the root of your problem is probably that Office is setup to automatically log in to the machine email ID.

Go to File menu > Account command. Under the "Account" column in the "Backstage Pane" at the bottom it will show what ID it is "connected" to.  If it is not the users corporate email account you can signout from the current one or switch to the appropriate one.

Chris, I suspect that the "limit of 5 licenses" you "read" about is a misinterpretation of the Office 365 license terms.  Most, not all, of the Office 365 licenses (including Business licenses!) allow a single user to use that license to install on up to 5 machines at the same time.  It is not a long stretch to seeing that to be misunderstood to be "5 licenses per account"

I agree. Having spoken to a client he said that the maximum that he could activate on a single account was either 19 or 20 licenses then it simply would not add any more. In his case, he created an additional MS account that aliases the actual email account and continued from their.

In order to identify which license belonged to which PC; he goes to the "Burn to disk" and requested the product key from their. Then runs an internal database which records which product key relates to which PC internally based on PC name and serial number.

With regard to moving to another PC, since this is the replacement for the old OEM model does that not mean that the software "lives and dies" with the PC as it's non-transferable?