The next version of Microsoft Office is 2019 and news today is that if you want to run Office 2019 on premises in your business, then you’ll need to have your fleet running Windows 10.
Many enterprises have been slow to upgrade to Windows 10 as they found stability in Windows 7 or 8.1. That’s no longer going to cut it, as Microsoft makes the decision to increase the minimum OS requirement for Office.
Office 2019 is expected in the second half of this year (expect beta releases in the coming months). Over recent years Office 365 has offered increasing functionality in their Office Web Apps, which are also likely to receive feature upgrades this year that may make you consider if your business could run Office as a web-only (like Google). As a last resort, you may consider staying on your current OS longer (not advised) and move to Office 365 subscriptions and using the web apps, however, the power users of Office will still miss the advanced features.
Windows 10 has now been out since July 2015 and since then has received many updates (2 major releases per year). If you’re still running Windows 8.1, it came out in October 2013, so hopefully in that time, you’ve focused on getting away from legacy apps that have restricted your ability to upgrade to Windows 10.
There is no stopping the Windows 10 train, whatever you think, this thing is happening and whether it is the Office 2019 decision or the end of support that motivates your business, its time to move to it.
Via The Verge.
