What is Microsoft's Office Plan past 2026?

Windows
1

I’m always in future growth and planning mode. For folks that have on-prem Exchange server – we know that 2016 and 2019 are EoL in October 2025. Many people are starting to plan their replacement right now. You’ll still be able to have Exchange on prem if needed – but you’ll pay recurring license fees instead of being able to just outright buy the licenses like you can now.

We know that Microsoft have waffled several times on pulling the rug out from underneath a version of Office you can buy and own instead of a subscription base. Looking at the road map though it’s not clear if we’re going to get an Office 2025 (we know Server 2025 is coming and we can own it) or Office 2026. For those of you not going into a recurring license payment – what are you moving to?

2

I was a supporter of maintaining on-prem servers for exchange, voip, and having full office installed. That is until “Hafnium”. The fact that M365 exchange was fully patched and us on-prem users were left out, really pushed me to migrate out to the cloud.

For the students learning from textbooks, the version of office had to remain the same as the book, but was always 12 months outdated. Moving to O365 and alternative methods of instruction was a good thing. Educational pricing vs. business is very cheap.

We also use the Google suite, but many of the Instructors that pushed for that have been burned by the sunsetting of certain G products.

For voip, we moved from pots to interactive intelligence to MS lync, and now to Teams. Early in the teams transition we had lots of issues, but most have been smoothed out.

3

For email im looking at the Synology mail+ and for office products im looking at wordperfect suite.

2 Likes
4

Microsoft’s obvious plan is to get everything into a subscription model as they’ve done with M365. I fought it for a long time and just gave up with the platform that I currently work with (SharePoint, Teams, etc)
Even the on prem versions of SharePoint with only have two years left are subscription based. I am goad to be retiring VERY soon.

5

You can buy the newest version of office without paying monthly and you can buy server – Exchange is on track to be different but I guess we’ll see come 2025…