Office 365 2013 End of Life – What you need to know.

Starting in February 2016 Office 365 2013 ProPlus and Business users will be upgraded automatically to Office 2016. In fact, many Office 365 Business plan subscribers are already finding themselves upgraded to Office 2016, without the option of rolling back to 2103 from the Office 365 portal. This is having major consequences as many Oultook and Office plugins don’t work correctly with 2016 yet. Exacerbating the situation further is the fact that Outlook 2016 doesn’t work with Exchange 2007.

What you need to know about Office 365 2013 End of Life…

1. The Office 365 portal will only give you the option of installing Office 2016 after February 2016, if not already.
2. Office 365 2013 (Pro and Business) will only be supported and updated through September 2016.
3. If you are not ready to automatically update to Office 2016 you need to take action to disable automatic office updates in Windows via Group Policy or registry edits.
4. If you are running Exchange 2007 you need to start planning an upgrade path since Outlook 2016 is not compatible.

Rolling back to 2013

If you find yourself in the position of Office being updated to 2016 automatically, and need to roll back to Office 2013, you have the ability to do so… for now.

1. Use this Fix it tool to remove the current Office 2016 completely from your system.
2. After restarting your computer download and install the appropriate version of Office 2013 for your Office 365 subscription
   • Office 365 Business or Office 365 Business Premium 32-bit
   • Office 365 Business or Office 365 Business Premium 64-bit
   • Office 365 Enterprise E3 or Office 365 ProPlus 32-bit
   • Office 365 Enterprise E3 or Office 365 ProPlus 64-bit
3. Follow the instructions on this Microsoft KB article to prevent automatic updates to 2016

Keep in mind that rolling back to Office 2013 is only a temporary solution.

Compliance Concerns

For those organizations that need to meet strict compliance requirements, such as HIPPA, PCI, SOX, or Dodd-Frank, you will need to plan on being upgraded to Office 365 2016 prior to September 2016 or you will risk being out of compliance since you will no longer receive important application updates from Microsoft for Office 2013.

Jonathan Eggers

Jonathan has over 15 years of experience in information technology, with a focus on IT strategy and enterprise architecture.

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