Office 2013 Needing to Activate After It Has Already Been Activated.

We have recently begun an upgrade from Office 2007 to 2013 Pro Plus on our corporate Windows 7 PCs.  We are using the volume license version with a known valid MAK.  We are pretty much doing a default installation using an unattended install, but they have also just been running the setup.exe from the install location once they started seeing this problem.  In every case, there are no installation issues and each installation of Office 2013 has SUCCESSFULLY activated.  The issue happens days or weeks later that the user is prompted to activate.  It will not activate with user credentials. 

We have seen scenarios where just logging in with an account with local admin rights is enough to activate it as well as instances where it will not, even when re-entering the valid key.  The latter requires our techs run Office repair just to be able to uninstall Office and reinstall.  But in either of these scenarios, the user may again eventually be prompted to activate maybe a few days or a week or so later.  So far most of the PC's that have exhibited this problem once and had it fixed in any way, have had it reoccur. However, some PC's only required reactivation once and other PC's upgraded have not been affected at all - at least not yet anyway.

This has been a recurring problem on about a dozen or so PCs out of 40 or so Office 2013 upgrades and the list of affected PCs is slowly growing.  There are no outright error messages in the event viewer, just informational. So if there is something we need to look for to troubleshoot, any advice would be helpful.

The PC's are all HP with the OEM Windows 7 installed.  Some of the PC's are several year old All-in-Ones, while all of the others are recently deployed HP Mini towers purchased within the last year.

As much as we want to resolve this issue with the PC's already affected, we want see if there is something that needs to be checked on the PC's that have not had Office 2013 Pro Plus installed yet.  Thanks in advance.

September 13th, 2015 5:23pm

Hi,

Please read this article below:

Troubleshoot volume activation for Office 2013

Refer to the section "How to get the text for activation error codes", obtain an error code by running ospp.vbs /act on the client computer to manually activate Office. If activation fails, an error code will be shown, it will be helpful to determine the issue cause.

You can post the error code here under this thread, or send the result you get as a snapshot to our email address:

ibsofc@microsoft.com

If you choose to send an email, please add the url of this thread in the message for easy tracking.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Su

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September 14th, 2015 4:45am