Office 365 Licensing – Change “Belongs to”

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Here's the scenario:

We have a company Office 365 account with multiple users.

I've assigned an Office 365 license to one of those users (say, Alice), and have installed the suite of Office applications on a PC.

A new user (say, Bob) is now using the PC, and so I have unassigned the license from Alice, and have assigned it to Bob through the Admin portal. Bob has then signed into the Office applications installed on the PC.

However, the 'Account' screen within any Office application on the PC still states that the software belongs to Alice whose license has since been reassigned.

Is it possible to change this, and if so, how?

Best Answer

After scouring Google, I've managed to solve this in the following way -

As @HerbGu correctly states in their answer, the previous activation needs to be deactivated in order to change the 'Belongs to' field displayed in the software.

However, since Alice was unlicensed, the Office 365 portal did not show any installations which could be deactivated.

Therefore, I found the following method (as suggested by user 'MASQ' in this thread on Experts Exchange) worked:

  • Run (as admin) on the client:

     cscript.exe "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" /dstatus

  • Note the last 5 digits of the Key displayed - call them XXXXX

  • Now run (as admin):

    cscript.exe "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" /unpkey:XXXXX

    This should undo "Belongs to" from the previous user (User A)

  • Now launch any Office app and let the replacement user (User B) log in with their 365 credentials

    They should now appear in "Belongs to"

For completeness, here is a reference for the Office Software Protection Platform script (ospp.vbs) used above.

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