The rental MS Office 365 is incompatible with the regular MS Office

Authored by Webmaster on 2022-01-27

If you install the MS Office 365 (rental software), you will not be able to install the regular MS Office on the same machine! And vice versa!

Some of our customers learned the hard way. All their old regular MS Office programs such as MS Outlook, MS Access and MS Project were rendered useless after installing Office 365 on their servers.

To address the problem, we had to help our customers uninstall the Office 365 rental license, purchase a regular perpetual license, and then re-install everything they own again. This led to a lot of downtime.

See the Microsoft error below during installation:

"Click-to-Run and Windows Installer editions of Office programs
don't get along for this version, so you can only have one type
installed at a time. Please try installing the Windows Installer
edition of Office instead, or uninstall your other Windows Installer
based Office programs and try this installation again."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office-installed-with-click-to-run-and-windows-installer-on-same-computer-isn-t-supported-30775ef4-fa77-4f47-98fb-c5826a6926cd

For businesses, we don't recommend you rent MS Office 365, nor any other software for that matter, unless there is a good technical or business justification. Instead, purchase a regular perpetual license.

Here is why:

  1. Your credit card company can deny or interrupt your services for payment and fraud issues.
  2. Your software rental company can deny your services and data your services anytime for trivial violations of the terms of service.
  3. Your system will be less stable. This is due to the frequent software feature, distribution, and management updates and function-breaking changes.
  4. Your rental software license will cost far more. It comes bundled with unneeded extras. Over a typical lifetime of the product of between 2 to 20 years, it is just not a good value.
  5. Your software rental company will dictate to you how your software is updated, used and managed. You don't have "real" ownership and control of your own data and programs.

Full disclosure: ECL Computing is an authorized reseller of both the rental MS Office 365 and the regular MS Office. We are eligible to resell to both for-profit and non-profit organizations as well.

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