Office 365 Licensing - Change "Belongs to"

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?

3 Answers

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.

The account displays beside Belongs to is the account which you use to activate the Office 365. If you would like to change the account, you need to deactivate Office 365 first, then activate it again with another account. For your reference: Deactivate an Office 365 install.

The account in the top right corner is the account you use to sign in Office 365 to access corresponding services. You can sign out then sign in with another account to access services in the new account. For your reference: Sign in to Office or Office 365

This is untrue.

I bought a subscription to M365 using my gmail account for personal use. This all authenticated fine to the point of purchase and download the pkg for my Mac.

When the installed ran it completed fine, but put all Belongs-to to a former company where I had a Microsoft account that was not used for the purchase.

It seems the install will piggy back on any prior install and does not warn you that your license you just bought is subsumed by the prior licensing. This is terrible that they subject us to this issue.