This is a great question, since we recently migrated to Office 365 from an on-prem Exchange server.
For us, what caused us to question this is the 49.5 GB of mailbox space -- and the desire to get rid of offline archives. I mean, really, if you don't need to archive, do you really want a cached mailbox that's nearly 50 GB in size? Heck no!
Not to mention whatever you archive is outside the control of IT. If a user loses it, and it hasn't been backed up, it's GONE.
For us, we also wanted the flexibility to be able to have all the laptop users access some cached data so they can easily work while on a plane or otherwise offline.
Our answer applies to Outlook 2013 users:
When setting up the user account in Outlook 2013, you get to choose how much data you want to cache based on a timeline. In the Server Settings =>> Offline Settings select "Use Cached Exchange Mode" and pick how many months (up to six in our case) that you want to cache locally. For us, the magic number was two months.
One extra benefit with Outlook 2013: the cached file is said to be 40% smaller than the cached files created in earlier versions. Now I can have a 50 GB mailbox, avoid the pain of missing archive files -- and still offer the convenience for travelling workers to be able to work offline if they want to. I say that's a good deal!
BTW, if they're not showing the image in this post, try going to
Subscription-licensed copies of Office are associated with the user's Office 365 account. Even if you reinstalled Office, that does not remove the computer from the original users's account. It's Microsoft's servers which are the canonical source of the subscription/activation info.
You need to deactivate the Office instance in the Office 365 Portal. Once that happens, the installed copy of Office will deactivate on the client. In my testing, the client shows a "subscription expired" pop-up the next time Office is opened. However, there might be some lag for the client to detect the deactivation (e.g. If the PC has no Internet connection when it is deactivated).
Once the "subscription expired" message appears, the new user can enter their Office 365 credentials to activate the install in their name.
Office 365 admins can list the activated Office 365 ProPlus installs for a user and deactivate them via the user accounts list in the admin portal. This is a relatively new feature, so you may find a number of outdated blog posts and documentation that says users must deactivate their installs individually.
Regular Office 365 users can self-manage their ProPlus installs by signing into the Office 365 portal (portal.office.com). So they can take care of deactivating old installs on their own without admin intervention.
I must point out that what you are trying to do seems like a pretty pointless exercise, unless the first User has hit their 5 device limit and needs to deactivate an old PC move on to a new one.
One of the major benefits of subscription-licensed Office is you are pretty much always compliant with the licensing, as long as you have Office 365 ProPlus subscriptions for all of your users. In your example above, it does not matter that "UserA" has activated a copy of Office on a PC being used by "UserB". Just make sure you have licenses assigned to all of your users in the Office 365 admin portal.
Also, note that the activation portion of Office 365 ProPlus is independent of the "sign into office" feature (the username in the top right of the Office application). It is perfectly valid for UserB to be signed into Office even though it was activated by UserA.
If UserA leaves your organization, then you just need to unassign their license in the admin portal (which you should be doing anyway as part of your offboarding procedure). That will deactivate UserA's install, requiring UserB to activate.
If the computer is shared by multiple users (a terminal server or a student lab), then you should look into Shared Computer activation. But this is not necessary for regular PC turnover.
In my organization, I haven't bothered with deactivating during normal PC turnover, until a user hits the 5 device limit. Then we login to the portal and clean out old PCs they are no longer using.
Best Answer
This is the official reference on how to exclude specific applications from Office 365 deployments: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn745895.aspx.
It looks like your syntax is incorrect; it should look like this (please note the spaces, or lack thereof):
Also, be careful about licensing: if the user doesn't actually have a Professional Plus license but instead has a different one, as soon as he/she logs in to any Office 365 application the setup will automatically start and make sure the installed applications match the actual license assigned to the user; I witnessed this myself when I erroneously deployed a Professional Plus edition to several computers, only to have the Office 365 setup remove Access and Skype For Business after the first log in of users which actually only had Business Premium licenses (SfB was not physically removed but it was made unusable due to a licensing mismatch: it was installed but it refused to activate, because the Business Premium edition only includes SfB Basic, while the Professional Plus edition includes the full version, and thus now the installed application refused to work).