Yesterday, I wrote about the one-year countdown to the end of support for Windows 7. End of Life of support is an important subject for many organisations and I’ve had some great comments made on LinkedIn about my Windows 7 End of Life Blog.

In many organisations, Windows often goes hand in hand with Office and often being deployed together as part of a desktop refresh project.  The version of office frequently ties in with the version of Windows, for example – Windows 7 would be deployed with Office 2010 ProPlus, Windows 8.1 with Office 2013 ProPlus and Windows 10 with Office 2016 ProPlus or Office 365 ProPlus

There is a very important date in 2020 for Office, with two very important events occurring on this date.

October 13, 2020

Office 2010 

All support for Office 2010 will crease.  It is important that you have upgraded to a supported version by this date. I would recommend that you upgrade straight to Office 365 ProPlus or Office 2019 ProPlus for the reasons I’ll talk about next

Microsoft provide some options and recommendations about upgrading from Office 2010 here.

Office 365 Online Services

The second reason this date is important is if your organisation connects to Office 365 online services such as Exchange Online.

On 13 October 2020, Office clients that are not in mainstream support will not be able to connect to these online services.

This could be a very bad day if you use Exchange online with Office 2010/13.

Office 2016 mainstream support will expire on 13 October 2020 and was originally going to lose its connectivity to online services, but Microsoft have listened to their customers and in this blog post reversed that decision and will support Office 2016 connections to Office 365 Online services until October 2023.

If you are considering (or it’s become urgent) to upgrade office, I would recommend Office 365 ProPlus.  It’s has an almost ‘as services’ offering like Windows 10, and you can choose the cadence of these updates (from twice a year to the monthly channel).

Office Insider

The Office team also runs an Insider program which I would strongly recommend you use in conjunction with your Windows Insider for Business program.

Check them out here

 

P.