Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 SP1 with Outlook 2016 odd behavior with ‘Prerequisites Not Met’, Microsoft Forms/Smart Tag What!!

Issue: Today I went to install the Outlook plugin for Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 SP1 latest and greatest installed. To my surprise I was met with ‘Prerequisites Not Met’

First Outlook 2016 was installed from the Office 365 install wizard , Then Installed MIM add-add in with just the password option as i knew there was some interop issues with 1302(MIMSP1).

Next Add-ins

Then I patched to 4.4.1459.0 and attempted change mode , again this machine is Windows 10 with Office 365 ProPlus with all the latest patches nothing else true green machine .

Running change mode it gave me the following error :

Like many other folks I went to my favorite search engine and seen did anyone else have this issue and well I found on link that talked about it but no true answer. It says to make sure to have .net 3.5 installed and reinstall office online repair mode. Worth a try but with multiple reboots and no success.

Then I started digging logs and my favorite tool Windows Performance Analyzer(WPA). When looking at this I see we was looking for a module “Microsoft.Vbe.Interop.Forms.dll” . Looking on machine under “C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL” I didn’t see this <scratching Head> at this point as the Office 365 installer doesn’t give you a customized install like select component xyz.

Looking at a few other machines with build numbers higher and lower there was not reason like yeah this build doesn’t install it . It was hit or miss to be honest.

Resolution:

Without being able to find this dll anywhere on the machine , I simply copied it to a folder on the machine that is was not present and ran gacutil command to install and register dll.

Opened up the command line and registered the dll in the GAC of the machine .

(Install)
gacutil.exe /i Microsoft.Vbe.Interop.Forms.dll /f

(Uninstall)
gacutil.exe /u Microsoft.Vbe.Interop.Forms

!!! This is not optimal but with no clue why one machine installs , we will save that for a later day !!!