Office365 Activation Problems

Table of Contents

Preamble

Every once in a while, you may experience an Office365 product activation error. This living document will be updated as new issues arise and their respective fixes.

Definitions

First, we will establish some definitions for this document.

Activation

The act of signing into the office product. This will validate and apply your Office365 license to the office product(s)

Office Products

A monolithic term to encompass all products within the Office365 Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, PowerBI, etc)

Credential Manager

Specific to Microsoft Windows, a utility that allows the management of stored credential tokens for the current user

Caution Triangle

This is the most common problem experienced with Office365 products. The most common indicator is the orange exclamation mark in the upper-right corner of your Office Products. An example can be seen below

Fix 1

The first fix is to see if it will fix itself. If you click on your name in the upper-right corner, it will present a menu similar to the image below

Try clicking on the self-help button, usually labeled "Continue" or "Fix Me"; give it 60 seconds to process. In a small numbe of cases, this fixes the problem. if this did NOT fix your problem, proceed to the next Fix.

Fix 2

At this step, open Microsoft Word. You may experience a popup similar to the one pictured below

You can click on the [X] in the upper right of this popup to proceed to the Word application behind it. Now, in the upper-left, click on File, then click on Account (bottom-left). You will see something that looks like the below image.

Try the self-help button here as well. It is also usually labeled as "Fix Me"; give it 60 seconds to process. If this did NOT fix your problem, proceed to the next Fix.

Fix 3

At this point, it doesn't appear the built-in mechanism are going to resolve your issue so a little manual intervention will be necessary.

1. First, let's close ALL Office Products, including Microsoft Teams (check your taskbar)
2. Now, let's open Microsoft Word.
3. Click on File (upper left) -> Account (lower left) as in the previous Fix.
4. Click on the link labeled 'Sign out' under your email address. You can see this link in the image above.
5. Open Microsoft Teams and sign out of that application as well. You can either click on your name in the upper-right and click on "Sign Out", or you can right click on the taskbar entry for Teams and click on "Sign Out".
6. Now, click on the search bar/icon next to your Start Menu Button and start typing "Credential Manager" until the program pops up in the results list like pictured below.
   
   
    
7. Open the Credential Manager, it should look like the below image.
   
   
    
8. It will default to "Web Credentials" so let's click on "Windows Credentials".
9. Scroll down to the "Generic Credentials" category. We are looking for any entry that references the following:
   • Teams: such as 'teamslv' and 'teamskey'
   • VirtualApp: such as 'virtualapp/didlogical'
   • SSO: such as 'SSO_POP_DEVICE'
   • Microsoft
   • Azure
   For each entry that matches the above criteria, click on the drop-down caret to the right of that entry and click on 'Remove' as pictured below. You will receive a confirmation prompt after clicking Remove, to which you confirm the removal.
10. Now open your Windows Explorer and copy/paste the following path into the "Address Bar": %localappdata%\Microsoft\TokenBroker\Cache\. It will look like the image below
    
    
     
11. Delete every file (they end with the TBRES extension) that windows will allow you to delete from that folder.
12. Now right-click on your Windows start button and click on Settings.
13. In the Settings window, click on Accounts, then click on "Access work or school"
14. Expand the entry labeled with your email address "###@sjrstate.edu" and click on "Disconnect", confirming on the prompt.
15. After removing the stored credentials, disconnecting the work account, and removing the TBRES files, reboot your computer.
16. After logging into your computer, open Word. You should be prompted to sign in like the image below. Sign in like normal using your email address as the username and your directory password.
    
    

If this did NOT fix your problem, your issue lies deeper which would be out of the technical scope of this self-help document.