Did you know: As previously announced via blog and MC175274 (March, 2019), Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020. After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements. We recommend that organizations with Office 2013 clients consider migrating to Office 365 ProPlus.
Support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 connections to Office 365 cloud services will continue until October 2023. Up to date information on current system requirements can be found under on the Office system requirements page, with related timelines available in the Office system requirements matrix.
How does this affect me?
Microsoft will not take any active measures to block older Office clients, such as Office 2013 and Office 2010, from connecting to Office 365 services. However, legacy clients attempting to connect to a modern, always up- to- date cloud service may experience performance and reliability issues. Customers will face an increased security risk, and may find themselves out of compliance depending on specific regional or industry requirements. Microsoft Help may not be able to resolve issues that arise due to unsupported service connections.
What do I need to do to prepare for this change
In order for you to better understand whether and how your organization is affected by this change, and where you need to migrate users, there are two System Center Configuration Manager dashboards (updated as part of version 1902) that can help:
- the SCCM Product Lifecycle dashboard allows you to see which versions of Office are running on your desktops, to determine which will need updated Office apps to help ensure a seamless connection to Office 365 services
- the Office 365 ProPlus Upgrade Readiness report on the Office 365 client management dashboard helps to identify desktops in your organization that are ready to upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus with high confidence.
Use these dashboards to identify users on Office 2010 and Office 2013 clients, deploy Office365 ProPlus or a supported version of Office perpetual to those desktops, and ensure that they will have supported access to Office 365 services after October 13, 2020.
If you’d like to schedule a free one hour consultation on Microsoft 365 roadmap planning with someone from our Microsoft 365 roadmap services team please contact us
