Office 365 Windows apps not upgrading to latest

 If you have ever come across the situation when your colleagues have features or annoyances in Office 365 desktop applications that your Outlook / Excel does not have?
And no matter how many times you manually initiate Office Update under File / (Office) Account / Update Options / Update Now nothing new comes?

We do a lot of collaborative editing of tracking lists in Excel where private, temporary Sheet Views of Data Filtering and Sorting come very handy so that one does not alter the filter criteria for the other editing the same list.

I did not have this option since I could not upgrade further than the (20)20-02(Feb) version of the apps:

You can also see the culprit: after much research, uninstall-reinstall that did not help I figured that the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel is not delivering the updates (yet).

If you do not want to wait you have to change the Office Update Channel: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/change-update-channels however the enterprise methods linked in this article did not work for me.

Thus I have researched some more and changed my update channel manually through changing my registry: https://www.solver.com/switching-office-365-monthly-update-channel however the changes described in this article also were not enough for me.

So what I did:

1. start regedit
2. navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration
3. Change CDNBaseURL to http://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/492350f6-3a01-4f97-b9c0-c7c6ddf67d60
4. Change AudienceId to 492350f6-3a01-4f97-b9c0-c7c6ddf67d60
5. Change UpdateChannel to http://officecdn.microsoft.com/pr/492350f6-3a01-4f97-b9c0-c7c6ddf67d60
6. Change UpdateChannelChanged to True
7. Start Excel (or any other Office application)
8. Initiate File / (Office) Account / Update Options / Update Now
9. Exit Excel and wait for the updates to download and install.
10. Open Excel: File / Account now I am on version (20)20-10(Oct):

Same with Word:

Office Update Channel changed to Current!

I also did some restarts in between, #6 and #7 above. You should do it too, if the above steps alone do not work for you straight away.

Stop Microsoft CRM making your life miserable!

I have been annoyed beyond words by how bad is the Dynamics CRM 2015 Client built by Microsoft for their own Outlook application. I went through quite a bit of research, fiddling, trial and error, and these things seemed to help a bit.

Funny bit is that the CRM web interface seems to work faster now in Firefox and Chrome than in IE and Outlook. :) (Outlook also mostly loads CRM pages into Outlook windows.)

Hope they will help you too!

N.b.: yes, I am writing this after installing the latest 1.1 Update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 for Outlook and problems still presisting: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3072333.

Script errors

If messages like this stop you regularly annoy the hell out of you:

..and render pages like "Edit Opportunity" unusable:

1. Exit all programs;
2. empty your %TEMP% folder;
3.  flush your DNS cache and Internet Explorer cache as described here: http://www.dynamicscrmpros.com/clearing-microsoft-dynamics-crm-common-script-error/

Getting around the problem

If you are till getting the script errors, but do not want to resort to using browsers, you can also set Ribbon: View / reading pane to Right, then you can see almost all Opportunity data on the right without opeing the item and triggering all the script errors.
You can also add notes and other stuff without opening it: Ribbon:Add / Note etc.

Obviously it would be best if MS just fixed this, but I got tired waiting for that in the past few years using the Alpha quality software they put into GA... :(

Annoying Tracking windows blocking you

If your hands are tied for tens of seconds almost every minute by these windows (which will happily block applications other than Outlook as well):

1) Go to Windows search bar, type CRM, and select Diagnostics (same CRM icon though).

2) Make sure the following are checked under Synchronization Troubleshooting

Then go to the Advanced Troubleshooting and Delete temps  then Enable crm outlook addons

Finally Restart outlook a and sync a few times.

Even less tracking

Open an email, that is tracked by CRM, then select Options form the bottom CRM pane:

This dialog should open:

And disallow your software to send email and check your inbox (first two checkboxes).

Additional sources I used

•  Send error reports automatically to annoy Microsoft, not the users: http://www.powerobjects.com/2015/02/24/disable-script-error-notifications-dynamics-crm-2015/

• How to get rid of blocking tracking windows: How tohttps://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/151320