Deferred Channel build now available for the Office 365 client apps

Enhanced admin settings for User Software Page

Starting today, IT admins also have the ability to further customize the User Software page. Admins now have the option to select the Office version and update channel (for 2016 apps only) a user can see and download directly from the Office 365 User Software Page. The changes IT admins make on the Admin Center will go into effect on February 23, 2016, giving admins the opportunity to change the default update channel and decide which install links to expose to their users.
Download and deploy the Deferred Channel build today

We invite you all to download and start using the Deferred Channel builds within your organization and see for yourself how Office 2016 has helped millions of users become more productive than ever.

In addition to this very first Deferred Channel build, we’re also pleased to announce that we will release the next First Release for Deferred Channel build in the next few weeks. This will be a fully supported production quality build for testing, with a targeted release date as a standard build in the Deferred Channel in June 2016. We encourage you to validate this build against your environment, applications, add-ins and macros.
We recognize that deploying and validating Office updates has sometimes been time consuming for IT admins. We believe the enhancements we have made since the launch of Office 2016 will help reduce the overall validation process, making it quicker to get these builds into your users’ hands. We are not done yet; we are continuing to invest more in our deployment tools in order to further assist IT admins and developers to validate Office against their environment and line-of-business applications.