A recent investigation was to ascertain why users were not seeing the Office 2016 Click to Run (C2R) splash screen during an install. The install was proceeding and completing successfully, but the users were not being informed of what was happening, so had no idea that Office was updating/installing.
From testing, it was discovered that the behaviour changed as of the January 2018 update for Office, and only happened when installing under the system context. Installing with earlier updates e.g. Dec 2017 were successfully displaying the splash screen. Similarly installing in the user context worked.
When querying this change in behaviour with Microsoft, I was advised of the following:
Microsoft has re-designed the UI to modernize it: “Applications running in Session 0, which is what running in a System Context, are not able to show UI without doing some action like running/communicating with something running as a desktop user (which would not be in Session 0). The scenario controller detects we are running in Session 0 and does not attempt to bring up UI since it knows it cannot. Therefore no UI comes up now when run from Session 0.”
The redesign of the UI and the implications to running the install in session 0 are currently undocumented by Microsoft in the public domain.
In this scenario, Office 2016 C2R was being deployed using SCCM baseline configuration which ran a script to check if the Application/update was required. As this was all running in the system context, the users were not seeing the splash screen. My recommendations were to try running the script in the user context rather than system context (which the baseline configuration allows you to set), or to deploy Office 2016 as an application in SCCM, rather than using the baselines. This then provides the option under User Experience to allow user interaction, which should then display the splash screen to the users. The steps for this are in the following TechNet article.