Understanding Office update channels, Changing for 365 Home or 2019 Retail

[mfessler]

Hello everybody,

the many update channels and the resulting version fragmentation are a little bit confusing.
And yes I know, I'm throwing Microsoft 365 and Office 2019 products together, but basically it's all the same soup.

If I understand it correctly, the different update channels like "Beta, Current, Monthly Enterprise, Semi-Annual Enterprise...) are basically only for "Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise" and "Microsoft 365 Apps for business", whereby these work also with the other 365 Business and even for the Home Plans.
The "PerpetualVL2019" is the only channel for Office Professional Plus 2019 and Office Standard 2019.
Office Home & Business 2019, on the other hand, will be installed with the "Current Channel" (formerly "Monthly Channel").

Since Office Home & Business 2019 does not get any new features (at least that is the case most of the time... there are sometimes minor exceptions) it makes in my opinion no sense to choose the monthly channel and thus unnecessarily generate data volume and and kind of crazy changing (practically replacing) the Version every month.
A change to e.g. the Semi-Annual Enterprise channel works fine.

But, I assume that is also not officially supported (or maybe even prohibited license-wise?), like changing the channel for the 365 Business or Home plans - right?
Does anyone have practical experience with changing the update channels for Office 2019 Retail or 365 Single or Family?
As I said, in tests it worked perfectly, but what is in the long run?

Thanks for reading and every answer!

Greetings,
Martin

[#2]

Hi @mfessler,

please have a look here, all update channels are described in detail:
https://www.msoutlook.info/question/office-update-channels

Important point: for end user products such as Office 2019 Retail and Microsoft 365 Family only the current channel is available (Microsoft 365 Family allows switching to the preview and beta channel) where the business editions allow for choosing additional channels with different time frames.

So while it might be technically possible to switch the channel, however it is not supported by Microsoft to do so because retail and consumer versions are designed for using the current channel only.

Moreover, it does not make sense either way to switch to a different channel because all the updates being normally installed on a monthly base would simply sum up to a big update when installing twice a year.

I.e. if every update would have 100 MB per month, at the 6. month you would have to install 600 MB of updates. So data volume is no argument for switching the channel.