As of October 10th 2023, Microsoft have now ended any support for their old Office clients, Office 2016 and Office 2019 (as reported in their latest blog post), but what does this actually mean? and will I still be able to use my older apps? Well, what you may have noticed is that, yes, you can still use your existing older Office clients to connect to Microsoft 365 services. This is great for those organisations using a VDI solution and are having trouble migrating away, but there is a huge ‘but’ here…
If you are still using the older versions of the Office client, you are now at a huge risk. As both clients are out of mainstream support, they will no longer receive any frequent security or reliability updates and you will not be able to use the latest Microsoft 365 features.
According to Microsoft, older versions of the Office clients are still in extended support and if they are kept up to date, they will be able to continue connecting to Microsoft 365 services until October 14th 2025.
While this is a significant change for some businesses, this should not have come as a shock. Microsoft have done well communicating this change to its customers over the past year or so, through its End of Support blog posts and message center notifications from the admin portal.
For those still using an older version of the Office applications, you have a couple of options, either consider upgrading to a supported version of Office, such as the Office 2021 LTSC, or make the shift to Microsoft 365 apps instead. For the best experience, I recommend you move to Microsoft 365 apps.
