Understanding Office 365 ProPlus Client versions for Skype for Business

Client management is a crucial activity in every Skype for Business deployment to ensure the latest hotfixes are installed and new features are available. It is recommended to have always up-to-date clients installed and latest patch versions. This article is about understanding the deployment channels for Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus.

There are two primary deployment versions of Office 2016 of interest to enterprise customers:

• Subscription based - New features released on the regular basis (as often as monthly), you can also install it on multiple devices with a single license (5 PCs or Macs, 5 phones, and 5 tables). With subscription based setup, which uses the Click-to-Run installation technology, both security and non-security updates are combined and automatically installed. Office 365 ProPlus is the subscription version of Office that includes Skype for Business, and is available as part of several Office 365 plans, such as Office 365 Enterprise E3.
• Volume license based - Also known as MSI based install, has the Office Customization Tool to install/configure installs. With MSI installs, the security and non-security updates are separated, and they must be installed separately. Office Professional Plus 2016 is the volume license (MSI) version of Office that includes Skype for Business.

Both Office Professional Plus 2016 and Office 365 ProPlus can use Group Policy for configuration.

Both are available in 32 and 64-bit versions. By default, the 32-bit version of Office 365 ProPlus is installed from the Office 365 portal.

The rest of this article focuses on Office 365 ProPlus.

Note: If users are local administrators on their computer, they can self-install the Office 2016 version of Office 365 ProPlus from the Office 365 portal. The Office 2013 version is no longer available from the portal for installation because it is no longer supported (as of March 1, 2017). For more information, see KB 3199744.

What are Office 2016 ProPlus update channels?
One of the benefits of Office 365 ProPlus is that Microsoft can provide new features for Office apps on a regular basis, as often as about every month. However, as the admin who deploys Office 365 ProPlus to the users in your organization, you might want to have more control over how often your users get these new features. For the Office 2016 version of Office 365 ProPlus, Microsoft provides you options, called update channels, to control how often Office 365 ProPlus is updated with new features. Here's an overview of the three most commonly used update channels in enterprises. More information about update channels can be found here: Overview of update channels for Office 365 ProPlus

Table 1 Office 365 ProPlus Target Audience

Notes:

• In September 2017, the following changes are going to take place with Office 365 ProPlus. Two feature updates per year for Deferred Channel and First Release for Deferred Channel, instead of three times a year. 18 months support instead of the 12 months currently. Channel names will also change. More about what is known as of time of publishing this blog can be found here: Overview of the upcoming changes to Office 365 ProPlus update management
• There is also First Release for Current Channel. This update channel provides an early look at the next Current Channel release. First Release for Current Channel is the same update channel that those in the Office Insider program receive.
• There are some limitations on running both MSI and Click-to-Run versions Project and Visio with Office 365 ProPlus. Please refer to this article for details: Supported scenarios for installing different versions of Office, Visio, and Project on the same computer

Which channel is right for my organization?

Current channel with its monthly cadence provides the latest and greatest updates to the product. Security updates, new features, updated features and stability and performance enhancements. The lifecycle is once approximately every month, and it is strongly recommended that customers update each month.

The Deferred Channel updates every four months and is trying to strike the right balance between feature richness and a reasonable 4-month update cycle. That means Office will update every 4 months with feature updates. Critical updates and security updates, if applicable, will still be deployed monthly. 

How do I set the deployment channel for users?

First Release for Deferred Channel provides an opportunity for IT staff to test application compatibility before the releases are deployed to Deferred Channel and before it is deployed to end users.

Deferred Channel is the default update channel for Office 365 ProPlus when the user is installing from the Office 365 portal. When an administrator is installing Office 365 ProPlus, they can also use Office Deployment Tool and Group Policy for Active Directory to manage the installation.

Note: Not all users in your organization must be configured the same. Example that early adopters use Current Channel while the rest of the user community is on Deferred Channel.

To configure the update channel for an Office 365 ProPlus installation, you can use the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool or use the Group Policy Administrative Templates files (ADMX/ADML) for Office 2016.

For Active Directory domain joined systems, the name of the Group Policy setting is Update Channel. You can find this policy setting under Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2016 (Machine)\Updates. The relevant choices when you enable the Group Policy setting are Current, Deferred, and FirstReleaseDeferred.

How do I find out what features are released to which channel? 

From the tenant admin center, you can determine which version is being downloaded by the users.

Note: This setting, only applies to users who are self-installing from the portal. When this setting is changed after installation, it doesn't change existing installs.

From the client side, you can view the version under File > Account (or File >Office Account for Outlook). The below capture was taken using Outlook.

How do I find out what was updated in my channel? 

For Office, all up you can view it in the following web page and you can switch between channels to see the specific updates: Office 365 client update channel releases

What do we recommend in SOF?

Our recommendation as part of SOF is to keep client versions up-to-date on the latest patches and clients should not be older than 5 months from the latest update. Our recommended client is the 32-bit Skype for Business 2016 client as part of Office 365 ProPlus. By default, Office 365 ProPlus client from the Office 365 portal will install the Deferred Channel release.

In closing

In this post, I talked about client versions for Skype for Business, the recommendation and timeframe we recommend clients are managed.

We are interested in your feedback and experience with client versions at your company. What is the approach your company took to maintain clients? Please discuss with us in our community.

SOF library documents

We recommend a few assets from the SOF library for this topic:

• Client Migration Workshop
• Client Migration Training

This post is brought to you by Skype Academy. Visit Skype Academy for technical trainings and readiness around the Skype Operations Framework.