Office 2013 on a Remote Desktop Session Host

I noticed that Office 2013 had been made available for TechNet subscribers, so I promptly downloaded a copy of Pro Plus to install on the RDS Session Host farm. When I browsed for a license key I was astonished to find that there was no Terminal Services Enablement Key as there had been for previous versions of Office:

You can see here that Office 2010 had this key:

I was further angered when I went to install the software and I was greeted with an error complaining about ‘only being able to install Office 2013 with a volume license key on an RDS server’ or something of that nature. Despite this warning, the installer continued and asked for a product key. Once the upgrade finished (Office 2010 was previously installed) I opened Word and was surprised to find that everything was activated and I was NOT greeted with a warning about this version running on RDS.

A quick note – this was an upgrade from Office 2010 that WAS installed using a TS Enablement key. Either way, office 2013 is now installed!

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