Office 2019 and 2016 to lose Office 365 services support

As you may already know, Office 2019 and 2016 are still popular today despite the allure and convenience of Office 365 alternatives.

Nonetheless, users have always been able to plug the older versions of the standalone productivity software into Office 365 services. This option won’t be available to them for much longer though, especially after Microsoft stops supporting the standalone suite for connecting to Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft to stop supporting older Office versions for Office 365 integration

As from October 13, 2020, older versions of Microsoft Office, including v2019 and 2016 won’t be getting support for plugging into Office 365.

Such Office clients are available as a one-time purchase, and if you still have one of those on your PC, you may need to upgrade to a subscription version of the product. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on the feature and security improvements that Microsoft keeps adding to its cloud-based services.

As Microsoft explains, the no-longer-supported Office clients may have performance bugs that the company won’t be fixing. In addition, connecting to Office 365 without support may also introduce software security risks and data compliance issues.

 After October 13, 2020, ongoing investments to our cloud services will not take into account older Office clients. Over time, these Office clients may encounter performance or reliability issues. Organizations that use these older clients will almost certainly face an increased security risk and may find themselves out of compliance depending upon specific regional or industry requirements.

However, the announcement doesn’t mean that affected Office clients are becoming obsolete soon. Neither does it imply that these older applications won’t be able to connect to Office 365.

The only thing that Microsoft is withdrawing here is support for the standalone packages as far as connecting to the company’s cloud services is concerned.

Recently, Microsoft reminded Office 365 enterprise users to upgrade to TLS 1.2 or a later version by October 15, 2020.

Do you use any version of the standalone Microsoft Office software suite? Kindly leave your response in the comments section below.

[wl_navigator]