Supressing the New Outlook which M$ forces on 06.01.2025 for Business customer

mbudke

Hi all,

Microsoft has announced that for all Business customer it will change to new Outlook on 06.01.2025.
Enterprise customer will be transitioned in 2026.
There is afaIk no global option in Office365 to disable this change.

The new Outlook looks completely different to the classic Outlook and brings tons of limitations.
I perrsonally do not see this usable at all and it will create a lot of support tickets.

It seems to be possible to disable the change via registry key, unfortunately the HKCU hive.

Do you have any Atera policies in place already which are confirmed to work?
I do not find a script in the Atera script library yet.

Thanks!

hegedusa

can you not run a script as the currently logged in user that will do a regedit and modify the key (which I need to look up).

mbudke

Thanks for your response.

Exactly this is the way I currently try but there are many cons I have to deal with:

• since the registry key is in the HKCU hive the script must be executed as the logged in user. This means the user requires permission to add the registry key
• since the registry key is in the HKCU hive the script must be executed as the logged in user. What to do with new users or users which are already off (e.g. vacation/ sickness etc) or are not going to use a specific computer
• with Atera you cannot run the script on login but just on timeschedule. Currently I run the script twice a day but this can mean that I still miss people

Maybe there is a better way which is the reason I created this topic.

info.alanbarnes1988

We need an answer for this asap as many are going to have this problem.

stuarthill

As an MSP with such heterogenous users and machines, it seems impossible to contact all company owners and garner their opinion on this [to them] trivial matter.

If the Microsoft-pushed update takes the users to the new version but provides them an option to switch back then I will just notify my colleagues that this change is coming and we will just assist them when they call, to opt-back to "proper" Outlook.

I have only a couple of companies where the boss has already expressed any opinion on the New Outlook, for those we will look to implement multiple daily registry settings to be run as logged in user, that seems our only weapon in this war ?

mbudke

I've done some more testing on this so want to share my results.

Switch from classic Outlook → new Outlook or vice versa did require to enter credentials with MFA in case it is enforced. This has a potential of support tickets especially that many companies do exchange their phones at the end of the year to spend unused department-money and as always forget to recreate/ transfer MFA.

I've tried to run a script as logged in user to set the registry keys. I did run the script at 9am and 2pm to cover half-day workers as well. Running the script caused a higher load on all machines caused by reg.exe
I've seen negative impact especially on Terminal Servers as the CPU started to spike.

gilgi

Hey guys, it's early days, but the PM team is working on areas that will help you with this area, through readiness reports, upgrade feedback and manual upgrades.
No ETA, but not something we missed.

mbudke

Thank you @gilgi !