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We have several Office 365 Business Premium subscriptions. Office is installed via the Click-2-Run and therefore subject to automatic updates and upgrades.

This notification was publishes to the message center:

Prepare for your Office 2016 upgrade

Details

Beginning February 9, 2016, Office 2016 Current Branch for Business will be available. The First Release for Current Branch for Business has been available since September, and we are now making this broadly available to Office 365 customers.

How does this affect me?

Current Branch for Business is the default update branch of Office 2016, for Office 365 ProPlus subscriptions.

What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

We recommend that you review upgrade guidance and develop a plan to manage the upgrade of your existing Office 365 ProPlus installations. Auto-upgrades for Office 365 ProPlus and Office 365 Business clients will begin later in February 2016. If you wish to disable auto-upgrades refer to the following KB article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3097292.

Now both the notification and the article explicitly talk about Office 365 ProPlus. This is important because Office 365 Business Premium does not support Group Policies and the mentioned registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\OfficeUpdate\EnableAutomaticUpgrade is in fact a Group Policy related registry key and will not work.

The reason I am asking is that we experienced a major issue with the upgrade of Outlook 2013 to Office 2016 that left all Outlook profiles in an unusable state on our QA computers.

How do I prevent Office 2013 Business Premium to automatically upgrade to Office 2016 Business premium?

To prevent any confusion, there is a related question on serverfault, but it only addresses Office 365 ProPlus.

Community
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Daniel
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  • As I understand it Office 365 Small Business Premium is a package of products, including Office 365 Pro Plus (the click-to-run office suite deployed on client PCs). Therefore the answers on the related question also apply to your scenario. – BlueCompute Feb 10 '16 at 11:42
  • No, ProPlus is a different product than Business Premium. – Daniel Feb 10 '16 at 12:34
  • Seems like a great question for Microsoft support. Have you asked them? – EEAA Feb 10 '16 at 13:25
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    Yes it is! I opened a support ticket with them. I am yet to expect an answer. But I think it's also a good question for Serverfault :) – Daniel Feb 10 '16 at 13:28

2 Answers2

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My answer is wrong, indeed Office 365 Business Premium doesn't support Group Policy. I looked it over, and seems that there is no way for you to control the updates unless you try to use the ODT trick mentioned in your question, or to upgrade your subscription

Original Answer: Your Office 365 Business Premium does not support Group Policies, but the Office 2013 application installed on your desktop computers does.

You will need to install the latest Office 2013 ADM files on your domain controller (not sure if this is the one, it might be another version but I couldn't find it https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35554)

Configure a group policy where you block the upgrade to the network machines and that's it.

Noor Khaldi
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  • No need to explain the difference between a plan and the piece of software that comes with it. And the Office application that comes with the *Business plans* does not support Group Policy. That only comes with the *Enterprise plans*. It does not matter if you install the GP templates because the result is a registry key beneath `HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies` which Office 2013 Business Premium ignores. – Daniel Feb 10 '16 at 11:35
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Microsoft answered my question: Business Premium 2013 (Click to Run) will not be automatically upgraded to 2016.

(2016-02-18)

Daniel
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