Office 365 automatically installed over office 2019. Help!

[brian_eybs]

It seems that all of our Mac users have had their Office 2019 installs updated to be Office 365 and are no longer working since we have not migrated yet.  Does any one know know why that would have happened?  And does anyone know how I can easily revert them back?

[jtrant · Accepted solution]

You can (and probably should) push an MDM profile to these devices to force them back to "old" Outlook.

Preference domain: com.microsoft.Outlook

XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>EnableNewOutlook</key>
    <integer>0</integer>
  </dict>
</plist>

[mainelysteve]

Do all of these machines have the volume license serializer installed? Certainly sounds odd if they did and suddenly they no longer do. To me this almost sounds like your end users clicked sign in on one of the office apps.

[brian_eybs]

Wait... was given bad info....  Its New Outlook which isn't compatible with Exchange is now being turned on.

[jtrant · Accepted solution]

You can (and probably should) push an MDM profile to these devices to force them back to "old" Outlook.

Preference domain: com.microsoft.Outlook

XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>EnableNewOutlook</key>
    <integer>0</integer>
  </dict>
</plist>

[ljcacioppo]

Second this suggestion here. We pushed out a profile setting that to 1 so that it wouldn't revert people back to old outlook that chose new outlook already, but if its breaking something for your users, enforcing that setting seems like the best choice

[ljcacioppo · Accepted solution]

There's also the "revert to legacy outlook" button in the Help Menu in outlook if people need to revert.

More details here: https://macadmins.software/feb15/

[brian_eybs]

Thanks everyone.  Pushing this now.  Don't know why most users were forced to new outlook and others were not.  Battle for another day.

[jpeters21]

if its the plist pointed out above, its a toggle in outlook, which is on by default in recent updates to enable the "new outlook" interface (which is not O365).. this will be the only interface in future updates so you might as well train your users on it now.. that being the case that should make no difference on if your migrated to O365 or now. Honestly in Office for Mac the difference between O365 and office 2019/2021 is only activation. If I use the volume installer with out the serializer I get the please sign into Office 365 page. 

[brian_eybs]

The issue we have is that we are still exchange and users were getting a similar message to this

[jpeters21]

wish I had a non-O365 account to do further testing for you.. if they literally put the new interface behind being setup in Azure that seems like a conscious decision to force people into a hybrid model. Are you seeing anything on Microsoft forums to suggest that is the case?  Not that it will help you now, maybe disable the Microsoft Automatic Update tool to save your self some headaches in the future.