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Microsoft Will Block Desktop 'Office' Apps From 'Office 365' Services In 2020 (techradar.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Microsoft is still encouraging businesses to rent their Office software, according to TechRadar. "In a bid to further persuade users of the standalone versions of Office to shift over to a cloud subscription (Office 365), Microsoft has announced that those who made a one-off purchase of an Office product will no longer get access to the business flavours of OneDrive and Skype come the end of the decade." PC World explains that in reality this affects very few users. "If you've been saving all of your Excel spreadsheets into your OneDrive for Business cloud, you'll need to download and move them over to a personal subscription -- or pony up for Office 365, as Microsoft really wants you to do."
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer. The IT security and reliability benefits and end user experiences in the apps is limited to the features shipped at a point in time. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of their Office 365 subscription, we are updating our system requirements." And in another blog post, they're almost daring people to switch to Linux. "Providing over three years advance notice for this change to Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy, budget and plan for any change to your environment."
In a follow-up comment, Microsoft's Alistair Speirs explained that "There is still an option to get monthly desktop updates, but we are changing the 3x a year update channel to be 2x a year to align closer to Windows 10 update model. We are trying to strike the right balance between agile, ship-when-ready updates and enterprise needs of predictability, reliability and advanced notice to validate and prepare."
Microsoft is claiming that when customers connect to Office 365 services using a legacy version of Office, "they're not enjoying all that the service has to offer. The IT security and reliability benefits and end user experiences in the apps is limited to the features shipped at a point in time. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of their Office 365 subscription, we are updating our system requirements." And in another blog post, they're almost daring people to switch to Linux. "Providing over three years advance notice for this change to Office 365 system requirements for client connectivity gives you time to review your long-term desktop strategy, budget and plan for any change to your environment."
In a follow-up comment, Microsoft's Alistair Speirs explained that "There is still an option to get monthly desktop updates, but we are changing the 3x a year update channel to be 2x a year to align closer to Windows 10 update model. We are trying to strike the right balance between agile, ship-when-ready updates and enterprise needs of predictability, reliability and advanced notice to validate and prepare."
If you run the other popular operating system, full installs of Pages, Numbers and Keynote come with it.
free too.
lose != loose
Could someone remind me of the actual benefits to using Office nowadays compared to a FOSS alternative.
Aside from the fact that Office has essentially taken older files hostage with propriety file formats.
Fuck you Microsoft. Fuck you for allowing OEM copies of Office to be purchased with a machine, but require it to be activated against an email address!!
Pro Tip: create an email distribution group of say software@domain.com and make IT staff members of it.
Fuck you for now allowing us to mix Office365 apps with OEM!
And Fuck you for making this such a miserable experience to deploy across the network as needed.
Oh, and FUCK YOU...just because for good measure!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
Outlook e-mail in the Office365 "cloud" is horrid and featureless. Click to Flag a message? It dutifully flags it with NO OPTIONS for setting a reminder popup or anything. Useless! I'm sticking with real Outlook running on my computer under my control.
I'm glad all these nitrogen-cooled 53 terahertz PCs are becoming little more than dumb terminals for whatever crap a web programmer sees fit to jam down our browser's throat.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Read the real story, not some stupid 3rd party blog.
Firstly, this is ONLY commercial Office 365 cloud services -- essentially, OneDrive For Business (effectively hosted SharePoint) - not to be confused with OneDrive for consumer (completely different) and hosted exchange. CONSUMER SERVICES ARE UNAFFECTED.
If I am understanding this correctly, the ONLY people affected are companies that [a] paying for Office 365 subscriptions (otherwise they would have no access to Office 365's hosted services); but also [b] not using the Office 365 included distribution of the Office software.
The push here is to get enterprises moving and use the Office 365 version of Office instead of whatever old version they bought as a one off -- you don't get to use Outlook 2013 to talk to Office365 exchange, you use the 'evergreen' Office 365 version of Outlook. Any enterprise that's simply using the 'current click to run' version of Office 365 is unaffected.
Consumers and people not using Office 365 services are NOT AFFECTED. People with Office 365 subscriptions using the Office 365 software are not affected. This is absolutely no different to any other service with a dedicated client that insists your client software is kept up to date. Netflix makes the exact same demand, for example, and nobody complains about THAT.
Absolutely nobody is required to pay any money for this -- you are either already paying for the new version (with your office 365 subscription) or you can't access the services you're not paying for ANYWAY. The only people affected are those paying for Office 365 but not using Office 365 version of the software that they are already paying for. That is literally IT.
SOON: The Windows OS will be rented, not sold, apparently. That would be one more abuse, of many.
This is being accepted: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
So, I'm guessing Microsoft managers think, "That worked. We will try another abuse."
One thing I've learned over the years is that Slashdot commenters are generally not good at reacting to abuse. Slashdot commenters make excuses, or react to abuse weakly. Also, for many Slashdot commenters there is a conflict of interest: They make more money if Windows is more difficult to administer and use.
Slowly increasing the number and severity of abuses causes many people to make multiple excuses, effectively accepting Microsoft's abusiveness.
However, Microsoft managers seem to lack social ability. The abusiveness of many of the features of Windows 10 are like a multi-billion-dollar advertising campaign that very effectively says, "Dislike Microsoft products". One of the many examples: Trying to imitate Google and sell "Apps", but to business users that don't want employees distracted.
One possible solution: All countries could support ReactOS so that the Windows OS can be eliminated.
No company should be allowed to have a virtual monopoly! Companies that are routinely abusive should be re-organized or eliminated.
Quote from the parent comment: "I've been using a combination of Google Apps and LibreOffice for years, never looked back and don't miss MS at all. Several of the businesses I consult for have switched entirely to Google Apps..."
Several years ago, I spent several hours writing something in Microsoft Word. Later I discovered that Microsoft Word was not able to open its own file! Luckily, I could open the file in Libre Office.
The parent comment is correct. Let's find other methods of doing our work. Don't rely on a habitual abuser.
Let's have a multi-national effort to improve Libre Office, especially the somewhat sloppy and limited user interface.
Why should all the countries in the world pay the Microsoft tax? The United States was founded because of refusing to pay an abusive tax.
what's on offer here is Microsoft's cloud backup service & Skype, which were free with certain standalone copies of Office. Offsite backups of your Spreadsheets is a big deal for some users, especially small businesses. And if you're non-technical the monthly fees are made up for in less downtime and not paying the local tech to periodically recover lost data.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Makes more sense than you might think. The problem is that people look at each "solution" and assume it's aimed at them. When it doesn't make sense, they criticize the fundamentals of that solution without realizing that it might very well be helping some group of people. Even take something silly sounding like juice packet subscriptions; there's probably a fairly healthy (no pun intended) market of people who would love to pay a little extra for the convenience of not having to purchase/prep/store fresh fruits to be used in their juice drink things. Obviously someone who doesn't have a lot of disposable income or is old and crotchety enough to instinctively hate change won't be that target audience, but it doesn't mean there is none. People generally do like flat subscriptions for things when the alternative is dealing with period billing minutiae. Maybe you remember when your internet was billed hourly? How about keeping track of your long distance minutes? Lastly, as an IT provider, I've been kind of happy to see things migrate to subscriptions if for no other reason than it forces companies to stop trying to squeeze 10 to 20 years out of software because they refuse to spent money on their business upfront (instead choosing to spend in the back-end via IT support for the out of date environment).
And there you go. Microsoft changes the features and terms of your usage of the products you purchase, after you purchase them, whether you rent or buy.
In principle this could prevent me from writing my scientific manuscripts with Word. On the other hand, nobody forces me to use the newest version of Word. Kind of to probe a point (but mostly because I like it more), I use Word 2007 to author all the manuscripts we publish. There really aren't any compelling reasons for me to upgrade to the new versions of Office.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's Office 2016. Which falls out of partial support at that date (for some features, there will still be security updates). So they are saying "hey, if you want to interact with Office 365, you won't be able to use Office 2016 from that date to do it". By then we'll have had several more versions of "not Office 365 Office (such as Office 2018 and Office 2020" come out, which will work with Office 365 premium services. And they'll each be supported for 5 years. Because support for all services isn't perpetual. And you'll still be able to use Office 2016 with your Skype for Business On-Prem deployment (if you have one). What they want to do is to not have to support some premium features for what at that point will be a 5 year old product. Like an LTS version of Linux. How long are they supported again?
We are a school that used to run exchange - we've run every version from 5.5 to 2010. It worked well for us and academic licensing is pretty cheap.
However....backup, anti-virus, spam filtering, and a DR solution drives up the cost very quickly.
Google apps was a very easy decision since schools get unlimited storage for free. Google also gives academic accounts the same SLA that businesses get - pretty nice.
Running Microsoft Exchange is cheap - running it properly isn't.