extending period to office 365 licence if not connected to internet

One of the problems with MS Office 365 is that you have to connect to the internet every 30 days to re-validate your MS Office licence or else it goes into reduced functionality mode. A guy here asked if it was possible to extend that as he had an elderly client who used Word but lived where there was no internet access.

I remember looking and found MS had introduced a feature for Enterprise users whereby the period could be extended up to 180 days.

Overview of extended offline access for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise - Deploy Office | Microsoft Docs

You could make a registry edit.

However, this was not for normal domestic consumers - they keys do not even exist.

So I wondered what would happen if I created the keys manually.

So on 11th Dec 2021, I created a Hyper-V vm with office installed, disabled the network keeping vm offline.

I am now at 24/01/22 (42 days later) and Office is still activated - no sign of RFM.




[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Licensing]"ExtendedOfflineSubscription"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Licensing]"ExtendedOfflineSubscription"=dword:00000001


Office must check the Microsoft account status every so often to ensure they don't remove the license and continue using the Suite.

Since the client doesn't have internet access, they'd be better off with something like Office 2021/2019 which doesn't use the internet what-so-ever (and have one-time-purchase options)

-James

James said:

Office must check the Microsoft account status every so often to ensure they don't remove the license and continue using the Suite.

Since the client doesn't have internet access, they'd be better off with something like Office 2021/2019 which doesn't use the internet what-so-ever (and have one-time-purchase options)

-James

Not really - the office licence gets deactivated but gets reinstated first time pc recomnects to internet provided the licence is still valid. In any case, you can legitimately install office as a free trial and rearm the trial up to 5 times anyway.

In the case I was talking about, the poster could connect elderly guy now and then via his mobile phone but could not guarantee every 30 days. The elderly guy was not paying afaik. That was more of a side story - the introduction of the 180 day period was more for cases like people who had pcs in labs as standalone devices e g. datalogging and were not allowed to connect to internet. I was curious if the regedit would work for domestic consumers. I cannot be certain even after 42 days but it looks promising.

James said:

Since the client doesn't have internet access, they'd be better off with something like Office 2021/2019 which doesn't use the internet what-so-ever (and have one-time-purchase options)

So how is Office 2019 & 2021 activated if it "never" uses the Internet?

Anyway, pretty much all software requiring activation (especially Microsoft) will need to phone home for validation. It's the new anti-piracy way.

cereberus said:

Not really - the office licence gets deactivated but gets reinstated first time pc recomnects to internet provided the licence is still valid. In any case, you can legitimately install office as a free trial and rearm the trial up to 5 times anyway.

In the case I was talking about, the poster could connect elderly guy now and then via his mobile phone but could not guarantee every 30 days. The elderly guy was not paying afaik. That was more of a side story - the introduction of the 180 day period was more for cases like people who had pcs in labs as standalone devices e g. datalogging and were not allowed to connect to internet. I was curious if the regedit would work for domestic consumers. I cannot be certain even after 42 days but it looks promising.

Good luck with the reg keys!