This is an operational update to all my friends in the MSP community but can also be useful to anyone that has small business based office 365 plans. As of December 1, 2015 Microsoft has begun to force all small business plan users to switch to or ‘renew’ into a new 365 plan structure. I won’t talk about the specifics of the plans, as you can read extensive information about the switch here:

https://products.office.com/en-US/business/moving-to-the-new-office-365-plans-for-small-and-midsized-businesses

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Renew-Office-365-small-and-midsized-business-subscriptions-afa5dee4-091d-4152-b849-6aef8463ca9c?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

For users and MSP’s the big issue is that ANY upgrade means you are forced to uninstall and reinstall the office. We are doing testing tonite to ensure this doesn’t mean you have to re-download all the exchange data. Needless to say, an uninstall/reinstall for large accounts will represent a significant amount of time and potential problems for the end users.

I’ll update this more as we do testing…

12/1/15 update:

Last nite we migrated a number of workstations to Office 2016 to fix the issue outlined above. It entails simply uninstalling and reinstalling office and opening outlook to ensure all data was successfully retained. The only caveat is that if your OST file is over a certain size Office 2016 can’t handle it and you have to run a script to fix. Office 2013 has a larger limit on the OST than Office 2016.