What's new for admins in Office 2016
Summary: Provides IT admins with an overview of the new features and capabilities in Office 2016.
This article is intended to highlight the new features and capabilities of Office 2016 that admins might want to know about as they plan to deploy Office 2016 to the users in their organization.
If you're looking for information for end users about the new features in Word, Excel, and the other Office apps, see What's new and improved in Office 2016.
Updated system requirements for Office 2016
With any new software release, you should review the system requirements to ensure that your computers meet those requirements. For example, for Office 2016, the minimum requirement is now 2 GB of RAM.
Another important change to be aware of is that Outlook 2016 doesn't support connecting to Exchange Server 2007.
New Group Policy settings added for Office 2016
As with any new version of Office, there's a new set of Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Group Policy settings. You can download the Administrative Template files from the Microsoft Download Center. Included in the download is an Excel file that contains a list of all the Group Policy settings and a list of the new policy settings for Office 2016.
Outlook 2016 adds support for multifactor authentication (MFA)
Multifactor authentication (MFA) is now available in Outlook through integration with the Microsoft Authentication Library.
Outlook 2016 now requires Autodiscover to be configured
Outlook now requires Autodiscover to be configured or it's unable to connect to Exchange Server. Outlook retrieves Exchange connectivity settings directly from Autodiscover instead of the registry, making profiles more reliable, but that also makes Autodiscover a required feature. For more information, see Autodiscover service.
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) added to Word 2016, Excel 2016, and PowerPoint 2016
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is now available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Admins can centrally create, manage, and enforce policies for content authoring and document sharing. End users see policy tips or sharing restrictions when the apps detect a potential policy violation. This capability is available with SharePoint Online and OneDrive.
Visio 2016 supports Information Rights Management (IRM)
IRM protection is now available for Visio files, enabling both online and offline protection of Visio diagrams. For more information, see Protect sensitive messages and documents using Information Rights Management (IRM) in Office 2016.