Office 365 ProPlus Licensing Requires Changes on Servers

[This report was edited after initial publication. See notes in italics below.]

Some organizations will have to change the way they deploy Office on servers if they license Office 365 ProPlus for their users, due to a licensing rule change effective Sept. 1, 2015. Office 365 ProPlus is a per-user subscription Office suite whose end-user features are virtually identical to Office 2013 Professional Plus, the suite commonly bought in Enterprise Agreements. Organizations that run Office on servers for Office 365 users should update their deployments to use Office 365 ProPlus media by the effective date to avoid a license compliance problem, and organizations currently deploying or planning deployment should update their plans to avoid problems later.

Old Rule: Deploy Office 2013 Professional Plus on Servers

Organizations often deploy the Office suite on centrally managed server-based desktops. For Office 365 users, organizations have been allowed to use the Office 2013 Professional Plus media to install the software on servers instead of the Office 365 ProPlus, on servers with the Remote Desktop role enabled. (The rule is published in the Mar. 2013 through Aug. 2014 monthly Microsoft Volume Licensing Product List and titled “Media Eligibility with Remote Desktop Services (RDS) for Office 365 Pro Plus, Project Pro for Office 365, and Visio Pro for Office 365.”)