Upgrade your Office 365 ProPlus to 64-bit

Why should I upgrade?

Recently Microsoft started to recommend its 64-bit edition of the Office 365 pro plus suite to be installed as the default Office installation.

Office ProPlus and Office 2019 will now be installed with 64-bit as the default setting. Previously, the default setting was 32-bit at installation. This change will begin rolling out in mid-January, 2019.

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Message from admin center office 365

Office ProPlus and Office 2019 will now be installed with 64-bit as the default setting. Previously, the default setting was 32-bit at installation. This change will begin rolling out in mid-January, 2019.

After this change takes place, the 64-bit version of Office will automatically be installed unless you explicitly select the 32-bit version before beginning the installation process.

While back in the days, add-ins did not work very well on 64-bit Microsoft has changed this by the automatic upgrade. Since April 2019 it’s possible with the configuration.xml file for a smooth upgrade.

uninstall / reinstall is not needed anymore

Show me how!

If you are deploying Office 365 pro plus through the Office 365 Deployment toolkit you can now automate this experience and add a new switch to your config file.

MigrateArch="TRUE"

You can do this the same as I have written before in a blogpost to change the update ring for Office 365

Make sure you will met the requirements before starting the upgrade:

• At least Version 1902 of Office 365 ProPlus
• Minimum version 16.0.11615.33602 Office Deployment Tool

Example Config File

    <Configuration>
    <Add OfficeClientEdition="64" Branch="FirstReleaseCurrent" MigrateArch="TRUE">
        <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
        <Language ID="en-us" />
        </Product>

    </Add>  
    <Updates Enabled="TRUE" /> 
    <Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />  
    <Logging Level="Standard" Path="%temp%" /> 
    </Configuration>

Run Updater

1. Download ODT from Microsoft

2. Launch PowerShell as an administrator.

3. go to the folder where you have extracted the ODT tool.

4. Change or Copy above configuration in a XML file or download the configuration file i’ve used from here

5. Run:

    .\SETUP.exe /configure configuration.xml 
   

6. take a coffee, this will need some time.