Today I was looking into the support of Microsoft Office in Azure RemoteApp. Based on my research the support was a little bit different that I had in mind. So I decided the create a small blogpost about the support of Office in Azure RemoteApp. My goal is not to republish existing information but just pointing you to this information and some remarks from my side. The RDS Product team has created a good article about the support, you can find this information here. This article describes the support of Office365 ProPlus but do not describes the support of Office 365 E3 licenses and the difference between both editions of Office 365.

Let’s start with mentioning what is important regarding the support of Microsoft Office in Azure RemoteApp: Shared Computer Activation. Shared Computer Activation lets you deploy Office 365 to a computer which is used by multiple users. The most common scenario is publishing Office in Remote Desktop Services instances. Shared computer activation is used only for situations where multiple users share the same computer. More detailed information is available in this TechNet article.

So based on the needed support of Shared Computer Activation we can look into which versions of Office 365 are supported to use with Azure RemoteApp. The short answer can be found on this link:

• Office 365 ProPlus
• Office 365 Enterprise E3

The difference between both versions of Office 365 is that with the Office Enterprise E3 license you will get the following extra functionality:

• 50GB Email box (Exchange Online)
  
• IM and HD video conferencing (Skype for Business)
• SharePoint Online
• Corporate social network (Yammer)
  

So with the Office 365 ProPlus license you will get all the ‘client’ Office applications but you will need to host your own Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint environment. If you want a complete package both Client and Server then you need the Office 365 Enterprise license. See below the costs difference between both versions: