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Office for Mac 2016 activation problem

Downloading Office for Mac 2016 from Office 365 subscription seems an easy task. Unfortunately it doesn't always go as planned. It seems to be able to use it with corporate resources it needs to activated. While the activation of products that are bought directly at Microsoft with your standard account is trivial, with Office for Mac thru Office 365 corporate subscription requires additional setup on on-premise infrastructure including ADFS servers. As this wasn't our task and we simply got a license of brand new Office for Mac to play with, we didn't expect to have any problems with it. At least not on the activation process

❗ Problem Description

After installation of Office 365 with corporate credentials, we've started Word 2016 and got a nice screen asking for activation of Office for Mac. Since we already have product bought as corporate client we choose **Sign in **and follow to next screen.

Office for Mac activation screen asking the user to sign in

Unfortunately for us just after going thru entering our corporate email address the error shows up.

Office for Mac activation error after entering a corporate email address

Similar errors as the one below have been described on other blogs but none was able to solve our issue.

Office for Mac activation error details page with activity ID and relying party information

Full error message:

An error occurred An error occurred. Contact your administrator for more information. Error details

  • Activity ID: 00000000-0000-0000-0800-0080000000d4
  • Relying party: Microsoft Office 365 Identity Platform
  • Error time: Thu, 03 Mar 2016 10:55:47 GMT
  • Cookie: enabled
  • User agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/601.4.4 (KHTML, like Gecko)

✅ Solution

After a lot of going back and forth with different settings, and nothing really helping finally we've shut down one of the ADFS servers and things started to get better, where we actually get asked for password.

Office for Mac activation screen prompting for a password after ADFS recovery

Shutting down the working server and starting back up the other one gave us the same problem again. It seems the blame was totally on bad ADFS server that will need to be verified further before going into production. After entering password checking for license started

Office for Mac license check starting after the password is entered

And as soon as it was found… activation process began.

Office for Mac activation process beginning after the license is found

To finally give us the Good News! Office for Mac 2016 from Office 365 package was Activated.

Office for Mac activated confirmation screen