App Volumes – Office 365

After installing Office 365 32bits in a Windows 7 64bit everything seemed to work as expected.

But after attaching a writable volume to the VM, Macros on Office stopped working even if it was a clean writable volume (not used before).

VMware KB provided a walk around for environments that use snapvol.cfg in Writable Volumes or in Appsatcks, but after trying to implement it, nothing changed, as soon as a writable volume is attached to the VM, Macros on Office365 stop working.

KB2145079(I will be using the Writable Volumes option but the same applies to Appstacks):

Writable volumes:

1. Attach writable volumes to a virtual machine.

2. Log in to the virtual machine as the administrator.

3. Open the computer management on the Windows machine.

4. Go to Storage > Disk Management.

5. Right-click CVWritable and click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

6. Assign a drive letter to the CVWritable.

7. Copy the snapvol.cfg file from the root folder of CVWritable and paste it on other location, such as desktop.

8. Open the snapvol.cfg file using a text editor.

9. Add this entry:

################################################################
# Office 365 Virtual Registry exclusions
################################################################

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun\REGISTRY

10. Save and close the snapvol.cfg file.

11. Zip the snapvol.cfg file.

12. Go to the App Volumes Manager.

13. In the Volumes tab, click Writables tab and click Update Writables.

14. Upload the snapvol.cfg.zip file to Update Writable volume.

After reading the walk around I noticed two things:

1. Office 365 it’s not on 15.0 but instead on 16.0
2. The path for the exclude_registry does not fully exist

After a quick search, I found that the REGISTRY folder is not under

\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun\REGISTRY

but instead

 \REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY

So after changing:

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun\REGISTRY

to (removing the 15.0)

exclude_registry=\REGISTRY\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY

log off and log on again, Office 365 Macros are working as they are intended to.

I hope this helps someone that is facing the same issue!