Introduction

The Microsoft Office 365 platform receives regular updates from Microsoft. By default, Office 365 updates with new features once per month.

Acturis only officially supports the Semi-Annual Release Channel of Office 365. This is when new features are only made available every 6 months, with only security and stability fixes being allowed in the interim months. This allows third parties to target a much more stable platform.

If you are having a problem with the Acturis Plugins in the Microsoft 365 suite, one of Acturis' first recommendations will be to swap to the Semi Annual Release Channel.

Assumptions

Swapping the release channel requires administrator privileges on the local machine. This is unrelated to any Acturis permissions you have. This may mean that if your IT infrastructure is managed by dedicated IT support, you will need to get them involved.

If you're an IT professional managing Office installations across a domain, you may be interested in reading Microsoft's official documentation, available here.

Swapping Channel

Entering a Command Line Environment

Firstly, the program "cmd.exe" must be opened with administrator privileges. To do so, simply search "cmd" in the Windows search box located in the start menu, right click the entry "Command Prompt", and select "Run as Administrator". 

This will open the UAC prompt, which exists to authorise intention that the application may make changes to system configuration. If it looks like the prompt below, simply press "yes", otherwise, enter a username and password of an IT administrator's account, as appropriate.

Issuing the Update Commands

In the command line environment, you simply need to copy and paste commands and press the enter key to execute them. It's highly recommended that you use the right click menu to copy and paste in the command line environment, as the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V have different uses there.

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun\OfficeC2RClient.exe”  /changesetting Channel=Deferred

Followed by

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun\OfficeC2RClient.exe”  /update user

The following screen should appear, downloading the correct branch, and will handle performing the updates.


Once the update is finished, simply close the command prompt and everything is good to go!