Today I came across an issue with the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office 2011. Microsoft issued an the 14.4.1 update back in April. It turns out it causes some issues with the Volume license copy. I found some other posts on the internet complaining about this issue.

So to explain.

We have a software management server deploying our software. We are using Munki, but there are others, Casper from Jamf, Filewave, etc… I was setting up a brand new computer, and Munki pushed out the Office install and all subsequent updates, a settings package which also deals with the licensing. What we found that upon launching MS Word, we are prompted to enter the license key, when it should not be needed. Turns out, that applying the 14.4.1 patch, causes this to happen. In an experiment, I did the install, and prevented 14.4.1 from going out. Launched MS Word, and it opened just fine. I then applied the patch, and then it still worked fine.

So to recap, if you are installing MS Office 2013 from scratch, make sure you launch it before applying the latest 14.4.1 patch. Then patch.