Just yesterday, I posted a blog about trying out Delivery Optimization for Office 365 ProPlus installs.  It was something I put together quickly, during a break while presenting at a SCUG Norway event in Oslo.  Fast forward to this morning, where I had an e-mail in my inbox saying “perhaps you might want to do this via a custom ADMX profile” (possible because the Office team put the value in a proper location, i.e. HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office) and then they provided the instructions for doing exactly that. Thanks, Scott Breen (from the Microsoft EDU CAT team in Australia), you saved me the trouble of figuring that out myself.  (What’s the best way to do work?  Have someone else do it for you.)

Now when Intune sends the policies to the device, they will typically all arrive at the same time, so it’s a race to get the policy setting applied before the Office installation starts.  But fortunately, that’s a race that the custom policy will typically win, since the Office installation will first download the Office C2R bootstrap executable from the internet, before starting the actual installation.

So here are the instructions:

1. Create a new Windows 10 Custom profile

2. Add a custom policy to install the Custom ADMX

3. Add a custom policy to set the “SetDOAsPrimary” setting to enabled

You can verify that the setting has been applied by pressing Shift-F10 in OOBE to open a command prompt, then run Regedit and navigate to HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\common\officeupdate key:

And as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, you can check with PowerShell to see that Office did indeed use Delivery Optimization for the installation.  Goal achieved.  Of course since this is a preview feature from the Office team, you might not want to use this for broad production deployments, but feel free to try it out and provide feedback on the results.