Changes on Office On-premise products

At Microsoft, we believe that the cloud will power the work of the future. Overwhelmingly, our customers are choosing the cloud to empower their people—from frontline workers on the shop floor, to on-the-go sales teams, to remote employees connecting from home. We’ve seen incredible cloud adoption across every industry, and we will continue to invest and innovate in the cloud as we partner with organizations everywhere to build the best solutions for the new world of work. But we also know that some customers just feel that they can’t move to the cloud despite the widely embraced benefits.

With this, we are glad to announce that we have built Office LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel) for a limited set of specific situations: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel.

We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organization, but only in specific scenarios. The good news is that you can deploy both Office LTSC and the Microsoft 365 version of Office with the same deployment tools.

Without access to the cloud, Office LTSC will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps, building on the features included in past releases. New Office LTSC features will include accessibility improvements, capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support across multiple apps, and performance improvements across Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The next version of Office will not ship with the Skype for Business client app, which will be available as a download in the Microsoft Download Center. It will ship with the Microsoft Teams app, allowing customers to enable and trial this experience if they so choose.

Also, with this, the perpetual version, and specifically Office Professional Plus and Office Standard will have five years of support (though October 2026) with no extended support and will both see a price increase of up to 10% effective as of 1st October 2021.

Note: this new version will be available in all Microsoft’s volume licensing programs except in Open License (L only option). However, the price increase will apply to Open License as well.

For be ready for all this changes, you can prepare yourself with our customer-ready material: download the file here.