Why does volume licensed Office 2019 and 2021 versions do have a static version number while retail Versionnumber is updated on a monthly basis?

Question

E.g. Office 2019 VL always runs in version 1808 but O2019 Retail receives a new version every month 2211, 2212, 2301... comparable to Office 365 in the current channel.

Are there differences between the volume licensed versions of Office 2019 and 2021 and the retail ones?

My Organisation is offering Office 2019 and 2021 only via the volume based licensing approach. I have a third party vendor which claims that his renditions with bookmarks functionality only works with Office 2019 retail. For me this is hard to believe since Office 2019 is feature frozen and should only receive Security patches. However office 2019 runs in a "different" version since VL always stays with version 1808 and Office 2019 Retail is currently in Version 2301

Answer 1

Hi @Christian Blum,

Office Retail version and Office Volume License version are using the different update channel.

So the update version number is different, you can refer to this support article:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-2019

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-2021

In my opinion, this is by design behavior to distinguish between the Volume License version and the Retail version of Office.

Hope the information is helpful.

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