Quick Fix: Office 2016 Downgrade to Office 2013 (Office 365)
October 29, 2015 11 Comments
I have a client who still runs Exchange 2007. They are quite a large firm and have well over 150 seats. For reasons i wont go into they purchase their Office software via the OEM channel along with any new PC or Device.
They recently went out and acquired a Surface Pro 3, but didn’t order Office. At the same time they also acquired a MacBook Pro which also needed a copy of Office. We decided this was a good time to get them started on moving to Office 365 and signed up for two licenses.
Of course Microsoft has just released Office 2016, which, if you do not know, does not support the use of Outlook with Exchange 2007. This was changed mid-beta and has caught out a number of folks. Myself included!
With Office 365 pushing 2016 out on new installs, we are met with a problem.
There are also several posts online about how to rollback, or choose different install options which did not seem to be available in our users control panel.
Thankfully a helpful Forum Moderator in the Office 365 forum has provided the links to download the 2013 version of the software, allowing us to ‘downgrade’ 2016 to a version that supports Exchange 2007.
There is also a handy GPO fix you can do to prevent any auto upgrades of Click to Run going to 2016.
Happy downgrading!
If you are looking for Skype for Business, you can download the old Lync 2013 client here, and it will update to Skype for Business.
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Thanks for this, very helpful and i’ll no doubt be following these instructions very soon!
Another way would be to use the Office Deployment Tool to setup a deployment share for the 2013 version of Office 365.
Do you have a link?
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219422.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
Cool, cheers.
Are there ant restrictions on what plans can use this?
Product IDs that are supported by the Office Deployment Tool for Click-to-Run
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2842297
Lastly then, this weeks winning lottery numbers?
I’m sorry, you’ve exceeded your maximum number of questions.
Well played.
i’ve just installed 2016 office and found out that outlook cannot be use in our Domain server office, any advice on that? my bos asked me to downgrade the installed 2016 version, its not the upgraded version of office.
What way did you purchase Office 2016? Not sure i follow ‘domain server office’