Microsoft has announced an update to its productivity suite, Office 2021, for consumers along with a variant specifically business-oriented, Office Long Term Servicing Channel.
Like the previous version, Office 2019, Office 2021 is Microsoft’s standalone option for people who don’t want to buy a subscription for the company’s Microsoft 365 cloud. Office 2021 is scheduled to launch later this year for both. Mac and Windows, Said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, at a company blog post Thursday. Meanwhile, Office LTSC will be available as a commercial preview from April on Mac and Windows, with a full version slated for later this year.
Microsoft will provide support for both products for five years, a slight drop in the seven-year warranty offered with previous Office products. Each will come with OneNote and will ship with 32- and 64-bit versions. Single purchase prices will remain the same for both personal users and small businesses, although there will be a 10% price increase for purchases of Office Professional Plus, Office Standard and individual applications.
The company did not provide many details about what kind of new features and updates we will see with Office 2021, but it did confirm what users can expect with Office LTSC.
“New Office LTSC features will include accessibility enhancements, features like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support in various applications, and performance enhancements in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint,” Shapiro wrote.
G / O Media may receive a commission
While I’m sure Microsoft would prefer if companies ended up in the cloud, it’s also clear that the company realizes that not everyone can or even wants to. At Thursday’s blog entry, Microsoft billed his single purchase version of office as a “specialized product for specific scenarios.” These scenarios include when users are on regulated devices that cannot receive monthly updates, process control devices in manufacturing plants that cannot connect to the Internet, or specialsystems that must remain blocked over time and require a long-term maintenance channel, he said.
In an interview with the Virgin, Spataro framed the company’s decision as “a matter of trying meet customers where they are. ”
“We definitely have a lot of customers who have moved to the cloud over the last ten months, this has happened en masse,” he told the dam. “At the same time, we definitely have customers who have specific scenarios where they don’t feel like they can move to the cloud.”
Microsoft has already kept it even with its advertising drive convince users move to the cloud, plans to continue deploying standalone and perpetual licenses for your Office tools for the foreseeable future. AAccording to today’s announcement, the company scommits to that promise.