Prevent Chaos from your Outlook Client Migration on January 6th.

In less than 10 days, Microsoft will enforce the migration of Classic Outlook to New Outlook for O365 users under the license of ‘Business’ and ‘Business Pro.’ Check below how you avoid issues with your email client, as many existing functionalities will stop working after automatic outlook migration if you take no action.

Microsoft-Outlook-Laptop
Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

What does this practically mean for you?

Suppose you run an organization or have clients with ‘Business’ and ‘Business Pro licenses. In that case, you may have to provide support and feedback on why this automatically was rolled over to their PCs without knowing it or losing functionality that was already used and wanting to roll back to Classic Outlook immediately.

The main difference between the classic and new Outlook is that it has less functionality in the following terms based on what Microsoft provided in their supportability matrix . What is ‘missing’ compared to the previous functionality is:

  • No Outlook Offline Support (MS announced it will be coming soon).
  • Limited capabilities for adding 3rd party (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) accounts.
  • No COM Add-ins.
  • PST file support (MS announced it will be coming soon).

I also have to mention that several people have reported bugs that have not yet been fixed so this is also something to take in consideration.

How can you prevent the automatic migration to the new Outlook?

There are several ways to prevent the automatic rollover to new Outlook. However, it all depends on a registry change inside Windows so that I will explain the registry modification here. Please always use registry changes at your own risk and test them in a lab that reflects your environment’s characteristics.

Registry key needed for disabling automatic migration:

Registry key needed if you want to prevent users to have the option to switch on their own risk to the new outlook:

How you can deploy the change remotely:

You can always use the Group Policy to send the modified registry keys to the computers affected. But in this example, I will use Psexec (Sysinternal Tools from Microsoft) to add the required configuration remotely, which works from an elevated PowerShell prompt in the same domain and can also be used for PCs that are not part of a domain if you use the appropriate commands to define the credentials.

Make the registry change:

psexec \\COMPUTERNAME reg add "HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\preferences" /v NewOutlookMigrationUserSetting /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
Add-Registry-Key

Verify the registry change:

psexec \\COMPUTERNAME reg query "HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\outlook\preferences" /v NewOutlookMigrationUserSetting

Expect the following output if the registry key exists:

Verify-Registry-Key

This policy will also be available through Group Policy, Cloud Policy, and Intune.

Conclusion:

The above will help avoid disruption to your environment and minimize support requests. Of course, keep an eye on New Outlook, as when it is mature enough, you will have to migrate to that eventually, as in the future, that will come out of support. Also, all the above will soon become premium O365 Licenses, which remain to be announced with specific dates.

I have also written an article on 7 Signs That Could Indicate a Hack To Your Systems. You can give it a check here.

For detailed instructions on the options you are having, check the article from Microsoft here: this official Windows Learn article .

If the above sounds confusing, very technical, or just time consuming for you current capacity, we are here to help Contact us by Clicking Here. We are helping businesses to stabilizing and optimizing their environments. We also offer monitoring as a service if you just want us to keep an eye and alert you if something has indications of the will stop working soon. Here is an article related to monitoring

About Alexios Pappas – Alexios Pappas has worked internally in IT Departments in multi-role technical and management positions for many years. In parallel, Alexios led IT multinational projects across several countries globally as an IT Freelancer. He repeatedly got Top Rated Plus distinction and also 100% satisfaction rate for over one and a half-decade, resulting from the Client’s feedback. Since 2015 he has been focused on informing and helping Businesses that want to improve and excel in their IT Section.

Tags: , , , ,