I am currently working in an educational institution that has Office 365 ProPlus available to its students.  Students install Office 365 themselves via the Office 365 portal, and settings are administrated through the Admin Center.

The instructors at my institution are concerned about Office 2016 rolling out mid-semester.  Currently the textbooks and accompanying simulation software is based on Office 2013 and will not be compatible with a new version.  The classes will not be moving to Office 2016-based curriculum until Fall 2016.  There was an understanding that updates could be disabled for one year through the Admin Center, but I'm uncertain how this might be possible with the Admin Center settings.

Will it be possible to prevent deployment of Office 2016 until the curriculum is prepared for it?  We are trying to plan for the looming change.

Are you participating in "First Release" ? (get early access to features/products)

https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2016-preview

https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Office-365-release-options-3B3ADFA4-1777-4FF0-B606-FB8732101F47?ui=en-US&rs=en-AU&ad=AU

I don't know if the "2016" version of Office365ProPlus-for-Windows will be deferrable or not.

Do you know if the "2016" version of Office365-for-Mac was/is deferrable?

Thank you for the reply.  The option for First Release is not enabled for the institution.

As far as I know, the 2016 version for Mac did not have an option to defer updates.  I was tasked with investigating the 2016 Windows update after the 2016 Mac update rolled out, so I can't say for sure.  I can't find any Admin Center setting that would prevent the updates once they go into General Release, though.

Hi,

I suggest you post the question in Office 365 Community forum to ask if there is such an Admin Center setting that controls this:

https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Su