For businesses who have not adopted Office 2016 yet, this announcement will cause a disruption. With less than a month to make the shift from Office 2013 to Office 2016, the challenges associated with this move can be daunting.

Microsoft announced that Office 365 administrators will not be able to download Office 2013 client apps starting from 28^th February 2017. The Office 365 administrators will be pushed to use Office 2016, the suite that includes Word, Access, Excel and PowerPoint. Further, Microsoft also announced that it will not release any feature updates for Office 2013. Office 365 Administrators need to note that Microsoft will end the Premier support/ Customer Service Support. Amongst all the announcements related to discontinuations, there is something related to Office 2013 that Microsoft will continue. It is issue resolution and security updates for Office 2013 that will continue till 10^th April, 2018. So, Office 365 administrators needn’t at least worry about security lapses.

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In September 2015, Office 2016 was released for Microsoft Office 365 users. One of the most prominent features of Office 2016 is the ease of sharing and collaboration, and support for multiple devices. The other feature that was evident with the release of Office 2016 was that it worked well with Windows 10. To know more about the new features of Office 2016, click here.

While Microsoft has been aggressive in pushing the product, there have been a few Office 365 users who stayed away from the migration. But now, the Office 365 administrators don’t have a choice. There are a number of questions that Office 365 administrators might wonder about like:

Will the migration be smooth and what are the potential challenges?

We have the answer.

There is no doubt that Office 2016 is different from its predecessors and offers a world of features. There also has been a drastic improvement in providing support. For example, you have these downloadable Office 2016 guides to get you started in no time. One of the most interesting and new features of Office 2016 is called ‘Tell me’, which helps you with what you want to do and it looks something like:

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Like any other change, even this upgrade to Office 2016 can pose challenges. Office 2016 can be daunting to users at first and they will have to be trained to use it. And there isn’t just a single challenge to deal with. Here is another one – Office 2016 client apps do not connect to Exchange Server 2007. So IT Administrators who are still using Exchange Server 2007 will have to upgrade to a newer version of Exchange Server as well.

The FastTrack Migration Service comes to the rescue. Microsoft with its FastTrack Service intends to help administrators with guides, tools and answers to their queries related to migration. Recently, Microsoft even expanded its FastTrack Migration Services to include support for Dynamics 365 and Windows 10.

If you have questions regarding Office 365 implementation or Office 2016, we will be happy to help.