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Users with Exchange 2007 mailboxes in their profile should not upgrade to Office 2016 as they will be unable to connect to their Exchange mailboxes. When they try to connect they'll receive the following error message:
The resource that you are trying to use is located on an unsupported version of Microsoft Exchange.
Historically, Outlook is supported on three versions of Exchange server. In the case of Outlook 2016, those three versions are Exchange 2016, 2013 and 2010. All Exchange servers in the network need to be on Exchange 2010 or newer.
The short term fix: you’ll need to re-install Office 2013 if you want to connect using Exchange services and access everything in your mailbox. If you only need to access email, use IMAP.
The long term fix: Exchange 2007 needs to be upgraded to Exchange 2013 or Exchange 2016 if you want to continue to use Outlook 2016.
If you need to view the calendar, set the account up in the Windows Mail app and only sync the calendar.
Disable Upgrades
If you need to connect to Exchange 2007, you can disable the automatic upgrade by setting the following registry key (create the keys if they are missing):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\15.0\common\officeupdate
DWORD: enableautomaticupgrade
Value: 0
You'll need to close and restart Outlook for values under the policy key to apply.
Do It For Me
If you don't want to edit the registry yourself, you can download this ready-to-use registry file. Double click to run. enableautomaticupgrade
More Information
Users who were auto-upgraded to Office 2016 from Office 365 Personal, Home, or University who need to revert back to Outlook 2013 will need to contact Microsoft support by selecting Contact Answer Desk on the Microsoft support page.
Business subscribers should have time to block the upgrade using the registry key, if not, see Obtaining older versions of Office for the steps necessary to revert to Office 2013.
Published August 2, 2015. Last updated on October 23, 2020.
I've just been caught out with this, a bit of warning prior to upgrading using Office 365 would have been useful. There doesn't seem to be any option to just roll back Outlook and keep Word, Excel etc,, it is all or nothing.
Correct, it's all or nothing. If you need to connect to Exchange 2007, you can call support and they will help you roll back. The contact information is at the bottom of the BCM article on the front page. (I'll add it to this page as well.)
Guess who is totally hacked off with Microsoft?.....
Yep. And me. Thought I would upgrade publisher so got a cheap upgrade from office 2013 to 2016 - great. Then paid for full Publisher 2016 - great. Then no compatibility to work exchange 2007. No workaround, no install f outlook 2013 running alongside Office 2016. How bad is this. Only coincidence I saw a post regarding compatibility before I ran Outlook. This is really poor. Never mind being aware of incompatibility before purchase what about availability of previous software versions to ensure compatibility. Upgrade of exchange server is a major issue to smaller businesses both cost and compatibility with… Read more »
To be fair, Microsoft has never supported more than 3 versions of Exchange with Outlook - newly released version + two older. Versions no longer supported by Microsoft are not supported in Outlook either.