In a surprise – but welcomed – move, Microsoft announced yesterday that the office support lifecycle for Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2016 are extended to January 2023 (EOL of Windows 8.1) and October 2025 respectively. In addition, Office 2016 connectivity support for Office 365 services will be extended to October 2023 (was 2020).
Other announced changes in product support lifecycles were extending Windows 10 Enterprise & Education support from 18 to 30 months. Also, for Windows 7 Professional & Enterprise, paid security updates (Extended Security Updates) will be offered, and those Windows 7 ESU devices will be supported through January 2023 – parallel to Windows 8.1 – with Office 365 ProPlus.
December 17, 2019 O365 Update: Office 2016 for Mac End of Mainstream Support As communicated in MC191345, September 2019, mainstream support for Office 2016 for Mac will come to an end. Upgrades are recommended prior to the support end date. @NetDef - The decision to delay blocking of BasicAuth connectivity was based on the breadth of impact across all Office clients regardless of the given clients support lifecycle stage.The end of support date for Office 2010, Office 2016 for Mac, and Office 2013 connectivity to the Office 365 services remains the same. However, as noted in the announcement above Microsoft will not take active. However, on October 13, 2020 – which is the date for the end of mainstream support for Office 2016 – these users will have their access to both OneDrive and Skype business services cut off. Released in 2015, Office 2016 mainstream support is due to end in October 2020. Microsoft has confirmed that this will be followed by 5 years of extended support until October 2023; however, in Feb 2018 they announced that Office 2016 will no longer be compatible with Office 365 after October 2020. Microsoft Office 2016 follows the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. This applies to the following editions: Home and Business, Home and Student, Personal, Professional, Professional Plus, Standard. Listing Start Date Mainstream End Date Extended End Date; Microsoft Office 2016:::: Editions.
The intention of these changes is to provide customers more flexibility in adopting modern desktops on the client end (i.e. Windows 10) and upgrade their Office suite, preferably to the susbscription-based ProPlus. The release cadence of the cloud has significant impact on organizations, which were told in February to keep in line with product releases as a lot of product support lifecycles were going to end in 2020.
Extending those dates not only gives them more flexibility to plan and upgrade, but also might prevent organizations to do only to the minimum, which is likely the reason many organizations are still on Windows 7 and why it took many organizations a long time to get rid of Windows XP.