Security updates to be offered for three more years

Oct 8, 2019 07:57 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft will discontinue Windows 7 on January 14, 2020, but Office 365 ProPlus subscribers still running this OS version will continue to be provided with security updates for the productivity suite for three more years.

In other words, Office 365 ProPlus will continue to receive security updates until January 2023, as Microsoft says it wants to give customers more time to move to supported Windows.

On the other hand, no new features would be released for the productivity suite during this whole time, and this should urge subscribers to move to a new version of Windows, like Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, as fast as possible.

“Even though Windows 7 will no longer be supported after January 2020, we’ve decided to continue to provide you with security updates for Office 365 ProPlus for the next 3 years, until January 2023. We’re doing this to give you additional time to make the transition from running Office 365 ProPlus on devices running Windows 7 to a supported operating system, such as Windows 10. But, during that time, as long as the device is still running Windows 7, Office 365 ProPlus won’t receive any new features updates,” Microsoft explains.

No change for non-subscription Office versions

As far as the other versions of Office are concerned, no change is happening here.

Microsoft says it will continue to service non-subscription versions of Office according to the lifecycle policy, so updates would continue to be provided until the end of support is reached as originally announced.

Once the upgrade to supported Windows is complete, Office 365 subscribers can configure the productivity suite to receive feature updates once again, and given these releases come in the form of cumulative updates, all the previously-shipped improvements are included in the latest update.

More information on how to deploy security patches for Office 365 ProPlus on a Windows 7 system after the January 2020 deadline is reached will be provided closer to this date, Microsoft says.

Via AskWoody