Office 2013 via Office 365 is going away
A key date that is fast approaching is the removal of availability and support of Office 2013 from the Office 365 portal. As detailed here:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/skywriter/2017/01/19/office-365-planned-service-changes-2017/
Office 2016 is the recommended version of Office 365 ProPlus and includes all the latest upgrades and new features. As we announced in September 2015, when we released Office 2016, beginning March 1, 2017, the Office 2013 version of Office 365 ProPlus will no longer be available for installation from the Office 365 portal. Beginning March 1, 2017, your users will no longer see Office 2013 as an option for download through the Office 365 portal, and admins will no longer have the option under Software download settings in the admin portal to choose to enable Office 2013. In addition, we will no longer provide feature updates for this version, nor provide support.
The requirement to upgrade an old version of Office on the desktop has been detailed previously and I detailed it here:
Questions about Office 2016 via Office 365
Probably the major point with Office 2016 is that it doesn’t support connection to Exchange 2007. This is typically going to affect those users still running SBS 2008, so you have been warned.
Part of the subscription features of Office 365 means that subscribers have access to the latest software. They should now ensure that they have upgraded any previous versions to the latest that Office 365 offers.
As mentioned in my article, users have 12 months from the release date of new software to upgrade to the latest version of the software. Failing to do so will result in their current version going into ‘reduced functionality mode’ where they can only carry out basic functions such as as read and open.
If a user has Office 2013 from Office 365 they will not be upgraded automatically, they will need to install the software manually. For answers to more questions about Office from Office 365 I urge your to read the above articles and make the change over as soon as possible.
Originally published at blog.ciaops.com on January 24, 2017.
