To receive our post-End-of-Support Microsoft Office 2019, 2016, 2013 and 2010 micropatches, you have to:
- Have your Office installation updated with all available updates provided by Microsoft.*
- Install 0patch Agent on each computer running Microsoft Office you want to protect with 0patch, and register these agents with your 0patch account. (Use silent installation with auto-registration for larger deployments.)
- Have a suitable number of 0patch PRO or 0patch Enterprise licenses in your 0patch account.
- Allow your 0patch-protected computers to connect to 0patch server (host dist.0patch.com, port 443) for periodic syncing in order for them to receive new micropatches and in order for you to remotely manage them (included in the Enterprise license).
* Additional explanation on updates you need to have applied
To clarify this requirement, we must explain how our micropatches work: each micropatch we issue is applicable to a specific executable module (usually EXE or DLL), based on that module's cryptographic hash. If we want to micropatch the same vulnerability on two versions of EXCEL.EXE, for example, we need to make two micropatches (i.e., port the micropatch from the one that we patch first, to the other). While such porting is often trivial (but not always), each executable module on any Windows system comes in many versions, with most Windows Updates changing dozens to potentially hundreds of executable modules. To cut down on porting, and more importantly, to minimize the risk of our users not having the correct version of modules we're patching, we want them to have (ideally) identical copies of Office. That is why we decided on our above requirement to "Have your Office installation updated with all available updates provided by Microsoft". We think this gives us the best chance of unifying all users' Office installations on a common baseline. Not installing some of the Office updates might result in some executable modules not being of the correct version, and micropatches for such modules would then not get applied. (Moreover, users would not even know they could have been applied but weren't due to improper version.)
MSI vs. Click-to-run Office installations
Your Microsoft Office may be a "MSI" or a "click-to-run" installation - the former being updated with Windows Updates, and the latter updating itself directly outside of Windows Updates. In both cases, you need to have all available updates installed.
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