Standalone Microsoft Office on EC2

Question

A customer requires a standalone version of Microsoft Office instead of Microsoft Office 365. They are using Windows Server 2019 Base (AMI ami-05bb2dae0b1de90b3) on their EC2 instances. From the Microsoft FAQ here (https://aws.amazon.com/windows/faq/) it seems like you can no longer BYOL for Microsoft Office for new licenses. Additionally, I checked the AWS Marketplace and only saw options for WorkSpaces, which they aren’t using. What options do they have for licensing a standalone copy of Microsoft Office on their EC2 instances?

Brad · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Their options are limited. They can only bring MS Office licenses that were acquired before October 1, 2019 and they can only run on EC2 dedicated hosts or EC2 dedicated instances.

AWS-dhelper · Answer

Recently AWS announced [Microsoft Office Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on Amazon EC2 with AWS provided licenses](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/microsoft-amazon-machine-images-aws-provided-licenses/), it means you can now provision EC2 machines with office licenses managed by AWS. The solution requires Managed AD as well as setting up license manager to track users and machines.
There's with details on how to set it up - [here](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/modernizing-with-aws/how-to-set-up-microsoft-office-on-amazon-ec2/)

Standalone Microsoft Office on EC2

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