How to upgrade from A1 to A5

To upgrade from Office 365 A1 for Faculty to Microsoft 365 A5 for Faculty, the process must be handled through administrative channels since individual accounts cannot change their own service tiers. If you are a faculty member, you will need to contact your institution's central IT help desk or administrator to request this change. The IT staff will assign the new tier to your existing account, which unlocks the full desktop applications and advanced features without impacting any of your saved emails, OneDrive documents, or team chats.

If you are the IT administrator managing the school's account, you can perform this transition directly within the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. You will first need to ensure that your tenant has available Microsoft 365 A5 for Faculty seats, which can be acquired through your standard purchasing portal or your school's dedicated software reseller. Once the licenses are active in your inventory, you can open the active users menu, select the target faculty accounts, navigate to their licenses tab, select the new A5 tier, and deselect the old A1 tier to complete the swap.

For schools that need to update a large group of educators simultaneously, managing individual accounts one by one is not efficient. Administrators should instead utilize group-based licensing through the Microsoft Entra admin center. By creating a security group for the faculty members and assigning the A5 license directly to that group, the system will automatically distribute the new features to every member and remove the old A1 restrictions without any manual per-user configuration.

After the administrative upgrade is complete, the faculty members can immediately access their new benefits by logging into the online Microsoft portal. From there, they will see a button to install the premium desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on their personal or school computers. If a user already has the web-only versions open, they may just need to log out of their Microsoft apps and log back in to force the system to recognize their new A5 status.

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hth

Marcin