Office Templates in the Cloud

Modernize your way of deploying Office Templates, through a cloud only approach.

Preface

In this modern day of Enterprise Mobility, using Intune and Autopilot. I often get asked, well what about Office templates files?

In the past you might have put them on a file share, or copied them to your users workstation, using a combination of scripts and Group Policy.

This is no longer optimal in a pure cloud strategy. Instead many organizations falsely assume that SharePoint Online, MUST have some built-in functionality to handle this. This unfortunately is not the case, and trying to put a URL to a SharePoint Library, into the Personal Templates setting, in programs like Word, will not work.

Personal Templates can ONLY be referenced through a UNC path or a local device path.

The modern way

To help my customers and others in the community, I have put together a script that much like my other OneDrive automation solution, uses the OneDrive client to securely and accurately transfer the templates to our Users profile.

Combining this with some registry modifications, we can tell Office, that there is a local copy of the Templates available.

The Template files will be read-only, as long as the user only has “viewer” permission on the Sharepoint Library.

Well how about if my user is not online, and haven’t used the templates in a while?

In this case, I have employed a neat little trick, to tell OneDrive to always keep the Template folder and it’s contents available off-line. Using the good old ATTRIB command, to “pin” the files to the system, always keeping them hydrated.

The Script

This is the meat you want. And I have been diligent with in-line comments, so please read thoroughly!

You can grab a copy of the script on Technet, or in my GitHub repo, which is most likely to receive updates.

Final Words

As always, I encourage you to contribute to this script via GitHub.

Just because it’s awesome to help out! And together we can make the best solutions possible.

Comments / questions / spoons / forks are always welcome.

Please follow me on Twitter@michael_mardahl to learn more about me and the knowledge I share.