Preparing for Office 2016 Nov07

Preparing for Office 2016

On September 10th, Microsoft announced the official release date for Office 2016 as September 22, 2015. According to a blog post by Julie White Julie White, general manager of Office 365 technical product management, Office 2016 will be “broadly available” starting Sept. 22 and Organizations with volume license agreements, including those with Software Assurance, have been able to download the new version since Oct. 1. Office 365 Home office and Personal edition will be able to manually update starting September 22, and automatic updates for these editions started on October 1st. These release dates do not leave much time for organizations to prepare to be updated. The new version boost of new features and changes that can have some administrators scrambling to attempt to control the nest.f What’s new? Office 2016 takes on the new update process of Windows 10, with the updates through the concept of branches. For organizations that currently control how their Office 365 deployments are updated, using an internal source, this will need to determine which branch they will use. The three update options: Current Branch – Monthly updates pushed out by Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network. The default setting for Office 2016 installation is to use Current Branch. Current Branch for Business – Provides updates 4 times a year. This is for organizations that are not bleeding edge and need to have some control on when updates are installed and take some time testing compatibility with other products. First Release for Current Branch for Business – Monthly patches that provide the ability to test patches before the rest of production users are updated. Some additional enhancements to the new version of Office 365 is the support for Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). BITS helps control network traffic when updates are...