Upgrade your Office 365 ProPlus to 64-bit

2019-04-22 2 min read Office365 Erwin Bierens

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.

Message from admin center office 365

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

Download ODT from Microsoft
Launch PowerShell as an administrator.
go to the folder where you have extracted the ODT tool.
Change or Copy above configuration in a XML file or download the configuration file i’ve used from here

Run:

 .\SETUP.exe /configure configuration.xml

take a coffee, this will need some time.