Microsoft Office 2024

   Upcoming Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 offered without subscription

Microsoft 365 offers the cloud-backed apps, security, and storage which customers worldwide rely on to achieve more in a connected world – and lays a foundation for leveraging generative AI to go even further. Announcing the impending launch of the software, Microsoft says: we know that some customers have niche yet important scenarios which require a truly long-term servicing channel: regulated devices which cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems like medical testing equipment that run embedded apps which must stay locked in time. For these special cases, Microsoft continues to offer and support the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC). Microsoft has announced that the next subscription-free version of its Office suite will be launched by the end of 2024. Hopefully, commercial preview of Office LTSC 2024 will be available from next month, with a full launch scheduled for later in the year.  The Office Long-Term Servicing Channel is supported for five years, and it holds great appeal for the many businesses which are not keen on the idea of software subscriptions. 

Microsoft does not exactly promote Office LTSC 2024 when it says that it “will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps”. The company would, of course, prefer to tie users into a subscription model, but is willing to admit that this is not always appropriate. Like earlier perpetual versions of Office, Office LTSC 2024 will include only a subset of the value found in Microsoft 365 Apps, building on the features included in past releases. New features for Office LTSC 2024 include: new meeting creation options and search enhancements in Outlook, dozens of new Excel features and functions including Dynamic Charts and Arrays; and improved performance, security, and accessibility.  Office LTSC 2024 will ship without the soon-to-be-retired Microsoft Publisher, and also lacks Microsoft Teams — although this can be downloaded separately.

While Office LTSC 2024 offers many significant improvements over the previous Office LTSC release, as an on-premises product it will not offer the cloud-based capabilities of Microsoft 365 Apps, like real-time collaboration; AI-driven automation in Word, Excel and PowerPoint; or cloud-backed security and compliance capabilities which give added confidence in a hybrid world. With device-based licensing and extended offline access, Microsoft 365 offers deployment options for scenarios like computer labs and submarines that require something other than a user-based, always-online solution. Microsoft 365 (or Office 365) is also required to subscribe to Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365; as a disconnected product, Office LTSC does not qualify. Office LTSC is a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances, and the 2024 release provides substantial new feature value for those scenarios. To support continued innovation, Microsoft will increase the price of Office LTSC Professional Plus, Office LTSC Standard, Office LTSC Embedded and the individual apps by up to 10% at the time of general availability. And, because we are asked at the time of release if there will be another one in the future. We will provide additional information about the next version of on-premises Visio and Project in the coming months.

The next version of Office will be available for macOS, Windows 10 and Windows 11, and there will be 32- and 64-bit versions. For consumers, Microsoft says: We are also planning to release a new version of on-premises Office for consumers later this year: Office 2024. it will also be supported for five years with the traditional “one-time purchase” model. We do not plan to change the price for these products at the time of the release. We will announce more details about new features included in Office 2024 closer to general availability. As with previous releases, Office LTSC 2024 will still be a device-based “perpetual” license, supported for five years under the Fixed Lifecycle Policy, in parallel with Windows 11 LTSC, which will also be launched in 2024. And because we know that many customers deploy Office LTSC on only a subset of their devices, we will continue to support the deployment of both Office LTSC and Microsoft 365 Apps to different machines within the same organization using a common set of deployment tools.

The future of work in an AI-powered world is on the cloud. In most customer scenarios, Microsoft 365 offers the most secure, productive, and cost-effective solution, and positions customers to unlock the transformative power of AI with Microsoft Copilot. Especially as we approach the end of support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 in the next year, we encourage customers still using these solutions to transition to a cloud subscription which suits their needs as a small business or a larger organization. And for scenarios where that is not possible – where a disconnected, locked-in-time solution is required – this new release reflects our commitment to supporting that need.

 Conclusion

There is good news for the future as Microsoft is not giving up on subscription-free editions of Office. The company has pledged its “commitment to another release in the future”. The next version of Office will have both Windows and Mac versions for both commercial and consumer. Office LTSC 2024 will be supported on Windows 10 and Windows 10 LTSC devices. Last but not the least, the next version of Office will ship both 32-and 64-bit versions.