Get ready for the new perpetual Office for enterprise

This new Office suite, nicknamed Office LTSC 2021, is simply a subset of the feature catalog of Office 365, and its more expansive sibling Microsoft 365, which will remain unchanged until its support ends.

Just last week, Microsoft announced the availability of the next edition of perpetual-license Office for commercial and government customers.

Let’s dive right into this and see what exactly are Redmond officials getting ready to introduce to the public.

Office LTSC 2021 will receive support up to October 2026

These characteristics are just some of Office LTSC’s that Microsoft has long used to cast the perpetual license as second-class, or even third-class, when compared to the rent-not-buy Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

The Redmond giant vastly prefers customers opt for the subscription plans of those latter product names because the revenue is first, never-ending, and second, regular and thus knowable, more or less, in advance.

It openly puts policies on perpetual license versions or limits what the software can do to push customers toward subscriptions.

Keep in mind that Office LTSC 2021 includes only some, but not all, features that are available in versions of Office that come with a Microsoft 365 (or Office 365) plan. Microsoft warned in a support document. “Office LTSC 2021 won’t receive any new features now that it has been released.

What’s the most notable new limitation to this iteration you ask? Well, a dramatic decrease in support, meaning that Office LTSC 2021 will be supported for only five years.

This is just half the time of most past Office suites, and two years shorter than the truncated-before-launch Office 2019.

Furthermore, according to Microsoft’s support lifecycle site, Office LTSC 2021 will receive support up to October 13th, 2026.

How will this affect Office as we know it?

We sort of anticipated your next question and yes we are ready to provide an answer for it. This support will consist of security updates and apparently only security updates.

Microsoft won’t provide code fixes to resolve non-security-related problems.

By far one of the most puzzling constraints on Office 2021 consists in the exclusion of a full license to Teams, one of the tech company’s most used products since this while COVID-19 pandemic started.

Office LTSC 2021 includes the Teams client app, but only includes the free or the Exploratory service for Microsoft Teams.

For example, Teams Exploratory is a 12-month trial that requires customers to upgrade to a Microsoft 365 plan to continue using the collaboration platform.

The new Office LTSC 2021 is available only via volume licensing and comes in versions of differing compositions for Windows and macOS.

The Windows version will run on both Windows 10 and the upcoming Windows 11, which will start rolling out to compatible devices starting with October 5th.

On this same date, the consumer and small business version of Office LTSC 2021 will also become available for interested users and parties.

And while prices for Office 2021 will remain the same as its 2019 predecessor, Microsoft has already stated that costs for Office LTSC 2021 will be boosted by 10%.