I have 10 new PCs from Dell of a new model. I am building the first system from scratch after wiping the drive to remove all spyware and data mining in order to protect our citizen's data and HIPPA data from unauthorized data mining in a small county government. This is our standard policy, which prohibits all forms of cloud anything. The goal is to upload the completed thick image into WDS for deployment on the 9 other systems and any new purchases in 2017. This normally takes only 4 hours to complete, as I have done this many times before.
After 30+ hours of "forever updates", checking for updates, MS support staff were able to complete the first round of 200+ updates in Win7. This is prior to joining the domain. However, the "forever updates" returned for round two. A co-worker managed to fix that and the system is now fully Windows updated. There seems to be no way to activate Microsoft updates, as all known methods now fail.
Office 2016 was then installed via open license media, which is known to be good. Same media was used to install on other PCs. After the Office install, we are unable to obtain the Office updates. I chatted with 7 different MS support techs who all took remote control of the PC, attempted to fix it, failed, and then disconnected after realizing this was hard to solve and actually required knowledge and skill. It took 7 hours to get this far just on no Office updates. I guess script reading is the only skill required to perform "tech support" at MS. Such people have no real troubleshooting skills and resort to disconnecting at the first sign of "taking too long" for resolution. It is a sad day when the staff performance metrics place speed above quality at the expense of the end user. Shame on those managers, who failed to train the trainers. I blame the managers NOT the hungry script readers trying to feed their family.
I phoned MS tech support and managed to get a supervisor from Office tech support. He too took control of the system remotely and was clueless about how to get it done. He seemed clueless about his own product line. He googled the problem and resorted to non-MS literature and finally declared Office 2016 to be the first ever MS product that was so good, "there are no updates". I indicated to him that without the necessary updates my systems would be subject to cyber attacks. He said, my system "as is" is secure. Really?
A few more searches proved he lied to me. There are MANY Office 2016 updates. I managed to manually download and install one of them. I plan to check one of the OEM loaded units to see if it can or was updated. I expect not.
I only want to update one PC not 10. I want to upload a fully patched image into WDS.
I must ask the obvious question. Is the intentional design to remove the "Update Options" from Office 2016 a penalty for daring to reject the data mining software of Office 365 and the rest of the so-called cloud data mining fraud? I know that in order to use such software the user must accept the terms of service. By accepting the terms of service the end user is actually granting permission for data mining! I swore an oath to protect our citizen's data. I swore another oath to protect HIPPA data from any and all forms of data mining.
We simply can not accept any agreement that basically says MS has the right to install any software (aka data mining update) they want anytime they want to. Also, the terms of service can be amended at any time. I can not allow MS, Chrome, so-called cloud, or any 3rd party access to private data.
I see no other logical reason to change a well established and proven model for providing updates. I also can't help but notice the lack of a dedicated Office 2016 forum. This seems to me to be a dangerous and criminal business plan by design.
Kurt