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I've begun deploying Office Pro Plus to my desktop computers and I notice that one of the things that causes activation to fail is the system date/time of the pc being incorrect.
I'm worried about deploying Office to my laptops because my users frequently travel outside the U.S. -- sometimes for months at a time.
Does anyone have any thoughts about whether my laptop users are going to experience problems either (a) when they're in a different time zone when Office attempts its monthly subscription verification, or (b) because their primary license location is set to U.S. in the admin portal?
Hello PCLOADLETTER,
The reason that a difference in time zone can interfere with this process is because of the authentication that the machine copy of Office needs to do with the server. If the time is off by more than 5 minutes, that'll prevent authentication from working correctly. What's important is that the system clock for it's region is set to the right time, which won't matter if they enter a different time zone. If you go to an EST zone from a PST zone, your time will still be right, it'll just be right in the PST time zone, and your machine will still think it's in the PST time zone. In circumstances where your system autodetects where it is and adjusts accordingly, it should automatically fix the time to by incrementing or decrementing it as necessary.
No, none that I can think of or have seen. The region the user is set to in the portal is simply biographical data, and the region set by the user when they first access OWA simply customizes their interface based on their local region. The local machine region is yet a different setting, and that's directly tied to the date/time in the local machine. You shouldn't encounter any problem having them set to different values indefinitely. The main concern is simply to make sure that the date/time is set to the current date and time.
Great. And no anticipated issues with operating outside the U.S. for long periods of time when the user's region is set to U.S. in the admin portal?