How can I get office update branch/channel with code/terminal

Question

I am looking for a way to extract something what is called in MS Office update branch/channel on Windows it can be found here in registry:

SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate\updatebranch

But I cannot find this value anyhow on MacOS bundles or defaults. Is this even applying to MacOS because I cannot find any info about that.

I know about UI way Help->Check For Updates. Although, I need to do some automation upon this value and the only way I see right now is to use apple script to handle that UI

Answer 1

Using MAU2.0's msupdate command with the -c flag:

/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft\ AutoUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/msupdate -c

Checking configuration...
{
    AutoUpdateVersion = "4.59.23051401";
    ChannelName = Current;
    HowToCheck = AutomaticDownload;
    LastCheckForUpdates = "Jun 2, 2023 at 4:25:34 AM";
    ManifestServer = "";
    RegisteredApplications =     {
    };
    StartDaemonOnAppLaunch = true;
    UpdateCache = "";
}

To return only the channel name, use something like:

msupdate -c | awk '/ChannelName/ { print $NF } ' | tr -d ';'

Answer 2

You don't have to dig around in System settings or Terminal, it's actually hidden in plain sight…

Help Menu > Check for updates > Advanced… > Update Channel

btw, defaults often only exist once created manually. If no default has been set there's nothing to find. See Choose which Applications re-open documents at launch for an unrelated QA which explains how these work.