~/work / office-2024-rollout

Office 2016 to 2024 at a hotel group

Part of the desktop estate was still on Office 2016, which is past end of support. I am moving it to Office LTSC 2024 in stages, so a routine upgrade doesn't become a support incident.

The problem

Office 2016 left extended support in October 2025. About 50 desktop endpoints still ran it, which means no security updates on software that opens every attachment users receive.

How I ran it

• Test. Installed Office 2024 on test machines first.
• Pilot. Deployed to a pilot group with a small set of test users, so any problem would show up on a handful of machines and not across all 50. The pilot ran clean, with no issues found.
• Licences. Sourced the licences from another IT team in the group instead of buying new ones.
• Rollout. Now allocating the upgrade to the remaining endpoints in stages.

What I took from it

A pilot group costs little and gives you real evidence before the whole estate depends on a change. The same pattern carries straight over to Intune update rings.