Microsoft has announced an update to its consumer productivity suite, Office 2021, along with a variant specifically aimed at companies, Office Long Term Servicing Channel.
Like the previous version, Office 2019, Office 2021 is Microsoft’s standalone option for those who don’t want to purchase a subscription to the company’s cloud-enabled Microsoft 365, and Office 2021 will roll out for both sometime later this year. Mac and WindowsMicrosoft 365’s corporate VP Jared Spataro said in a company blog post on Thursday. Meanwhile, Office LTSC will be available as a commercial preview for both Mac and Windows starting April, with a full release scheduled for later this year.
Microsoft offers support for both products for five years, a small reduction from the seven-year warranty that is offered with previous Office products. Each comes with OneNote and comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. One-time purchase prices remain the same for both personal and small business users, although there is a 10% increase in price for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and individual Office app purchases.
The company didn’t provide much detail on what kind of new features and updates we’ll see with Office 2021, but it did confirm what users can expect with Office LTSC.
“New Office LTSC features include accessibility improvements, capabilities such as Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support for multiple apps, and performance improvements in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint,” Shapiro wrote.
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While I’m sure Microsoft would prefer it if companies had just moved to the cloud, it’s also clear that the company realizes that not everyone can or even wants to do that. In Thursday’s blog post, Microsoft billed one-time purchase version from Office as a ‘special product for specific scenarios’. These scenarios include where users are on regulated devices that cannot receive monthly updates, process control devices on a production floor that cannot be connected to the Internet, or specialty systems that must remain locked down on time and require a long-term service channel, he said.
In an interview with the edgeSpataro framed the company’s decision as “a matter of trying meet customers where they are. ”
“We certainly have a lot of customers who have moved to the cloud in the last 10 months, that has happened on a massive scale,” he told the outlet. “At the same time, we certainly have customers with specific scenarios where they don’t feel like they can move to the cloud.”
Microsoft has previously maintained that even with his advertising pressure convince users to move to the cloud, it intends to continue unroll stand-alone, perpetual licenses for the Office tools for the foreseeable future. And based on today’s announcement that the company seems is committed to that promise.