During Microsoft’s tech conference Ignite, late September 2020, they announced some interesting news around Office and Office servers. Here are the highlights known today.
Read time: 2 minutes
Perpetual Office
Whereas everybody thought that Office 2019 would be the last perpetual Microsoft Office version, nothing is less true. Despite the push to Office Apps through cloud based usage, like Microsoft 365 and Office 365, Microsoft will release a new version of it’s classic Office suite of applications in the second half of 2021. For those unfamiliar with Microsoft Office, it is a suite of applications, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and more and is available in various editions: Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, Office for the Mac and particular retail versions. When it becomes available, and if this new version will be Office 2021 remains unknown today. More information is expected to the end of this calendar year. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay tuned.
Office Servers
One series of products tight to Office are the Office Servers, better known as Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Skype for Business Server and Project Server. As to be expected, new versions of those servers will also be launched second half of 2021. But … the servers will only be available with the purchase of a subscription license. How this will work is also unknown at the moment. It could be an Exchange Server 2021 subscription license, but as well a ‘Microsoft 365 E3 Exchange Server add on’ subscription for certain hybrid deployment options. To be true, all we speculate now is the wild guess. We do have to wait until the end of this year for more information.
Be ready
Is your organization still using Office 2013 or 2016? Or Exchange Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2016 and so on? Then it is about time to upgrade to the latest – current – version 2019. When you do so, you will be ready for the next version of those applications without major upgrades at that time. Do you need help? Please contact one of our technology specialists.