Office 365 Things You Need To Know: Office 2016, When will it be available in Office 365?

Todd Sweetser

Hi Cloud Sellers!

A very common question we have been hearing since Office 2016 has been released is “when will my Office 365 ProPlus or Business customer receive the Office 2016 client?” While this should be cut and dry, it is a bit more complex than you would expect. After some investigating we were able to find a good resource online on a Wiki post in the Office 365 Community, Office 2016 Problems and Solutions and Frequently Asked Questions.

Specifically, this table is copied from that page that describes how this is handled based on Office 365 Plans or versions:

Office 365 plans or versions

Upgrade timeline

Default Update branch

More Information about how to upgrade

Office 365 Business plans (Small Business Premium, Business, Business Premium)

Available now for new installations.

Automatic upgrades will occur later this year.

Current Branch

See How do I update Office to Office 2016 using Office 365 for business?

Office 365 ProPlus SKU(Enterprise, Midsize, Education)

Planned for the first quarter of 2016.

Current Branch for Business*

Where can I find information about updating Office 365 ProPlus to the Office 2016 version?

*ProPlus can be configured to use Current Branch if desired. See the

Configure the update branch to be used by Office 365 ProPlus section from here.

First Release

Available now.

First Release for Current Branch for Business

More information about First Release for Office

Office 365 Home, Personal, or University.

How do I get my Office 365 upgrade to Office 2016? Note this does not apply to business products.

Note that Office 365 ProPlus and Business update timing is different as there is a new functionality called Update Branches (similar to Windows 10.) For details on how this works is documented at Overview of update branches for Office 365 ProPlus

A few other good resource links on the topic:

Prepare to update Office 365 ProPlus to the Office 2016 version
Change management for Office 365 clients
Office 365 client update branch releases

BTW, please check out the full series on Office 365 You Need to Know here: https://office365.msts2.com

Thanks! And good selling!