The June Office 365 client update (version 1602) includes a number of new features and capabilities for those receiving updates from the Deferred Channel. As you might recall from a previous post, the Deferred Channel allows organizations to choose an update schedule that reduces the frequency of feature changes for the Windows desktop apps, enabling IT admins and developers to have more time between releases to validate Office against their line-of-business applications, add-ins and macros. New features are available in the Deferred Channel three times per year, on “Patch Tuesday,” in February, June and October.
For information on the updates available in this month’s Deferred Channel, visit the Office 365 client release notes. In addition, the existing Office 365 ProPlus version (1509) within the Deferred Channel will continue to be serviced for an additional four months. For information on how to download and install these builds, visit our Office 365 ProPlus TechNet site.
Improved versioning for the Deferred Channel
We’re improving our updates naming to help distinguish multiple Office updates. To help distinguish between major updates and their subsequent builds, we are implementing a versioning scheme that will help simplify how we refer to all Office updates.
Each Office update will be represented by a year and month. For example, version 1605 corresponds to the May 2016 update. To distinguish builds within each version we will add a build number, for example: version 1605 (Build 6758.1000). This versioning scheme is similar to what you see with Windows 10 and the System Center Configuration Manager and should provide an easier way to distinguish the different builds.
Get ready for the October Deferred Channel release
We will make version 1605 available in the October 2016 Deferred Channel update. You can also obtain this release though the First Release for Deferred Channel. We encourage you to download and start validating this build against your environment and line-of-business add-ins, applications and macros.
We encourage you to download and install the latest Office 365 client update (version 1602) from the Deferred Channel and start validating the next First Release for Deferred Channel update (version 1605) in the coming weeks.
—Amesh Mansukhani, senior program manager for the Office Engineering team
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