Office Business Apps with Enterprise E5 License

[RonW-KJ]

Hi,

I have a client that currently has 50+ Office 365 Business licenses, so that users can use the Business Office Apps on their PCs. I'm now looking to purchase E5 licenses for the group, and migrate into the Office 365 Exchange platform for mail. My plan is to remove the Business license for all users, and replace it with the E5 license.  Can I have users continue to use their current desktop Office Apps, and simply assign them a E5 license and remove the Business license? Or do I need to uninstall their Apps, assign the E5 licenses, remove the Business license, then reinstall the apps?  What would users experience if they kept their current apps when the license is changed? I'm trying to avoid having to do a full uninstall/reinstall across the org.

Thank you!

Ron

[#2]

Hi @RonW-KJ

Thanks for raising this.

The issue here is that Office in E5 (Office Pro Plus) is different to the one you currently have within Office 365 Business (Office Business). So you would need to install the new version and uninstall the old version of Office. There is a few ways to approach this

1.) Upgrade users from Office 365 Business to Office 365 Pro Plus, removing the old and installing the new, then convert the Office 365 Pro Plus licences to E5 when rolling out the mail and other apps. This is advantageous if the office rollout will take some time and reduce cost as you are only paying for what you use.

2.) Upgrade users to E5, removing the old and installing the new Office - you could do this whilst doing an Exchange migration (cutover or staged) depending on resources. Office configuration is typically done during profile reconfiguration for the mailboxes and the advantage of doing this is doing it all in one go for the user.

Unfortunately, Office 365 Business does not 'upgrade' to Pro Plus (wish it did!). The users would have an issue after the licences are converted and the old Business licences removed if they kept trying to use their current installed apps.

Hope that answers your question

Best, Chris

[#3]

@Christopher Hoard  thank you Chris, that is very helpful!