Forum Discussion
Support for M365 Apps (O365) on Windows 2022
First off I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and apologize for the delay in responding to this thread. Your feedback has made a difference, and sparked many internal discussions... we have customers running M365 on WS2016 and WS2019 today, and we want to enable staying current and secure being able to upgrade to WS2022.
<UPDATED EDIT> In response to your feedback we have announced support for M365 on Windows Server 2022, please see this link for additional information:
Windows Server end of support and Microsoft 365 Apps - Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn
Again, thank you for your feedback and passion!!
Elden Christensen
Principal Group PM Manager
Windows Server Development Team
greatquux- They do - the history of that development (along with the ever onwards march to Azure) is where this whole story starts.
Microsoft originally didn't have a short-term policy and focussed on long term support for their products - the OnPremise world. They were actually pretty fair and good at this compared to the numerous other vendors out there. Although it has annoyed me immensely that TechNet got trashed and articles that people linked to just produce 404 errors!
Then they "invented" Cloud and had to work out how to move rapidly in that world against Google and AWS - so they came up with 3 streams - LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel), SAC (Semi-Annual Channel) and Modern (ie Cloud Delivered Products). However, they got rid of SAC in August 2022 and only have LTSC and Modern now.
For Office there are 2 channels - LTSC (fully supported on Windows Server and always has been - traditionally purchased as Perpetual or Subscription licensing, however not guaranteed to work with Office 365/Microsoft 365 after a set date) and Modern (Office 365/Microsoft 365 delivered). But the issue is customers want to use the copies of Office they purchase through Modern subscriptions on their LTSC copies of Windows Server, ie they don't want to license twice and have to buy an LTSC Office copy for their Windows Server as well as a subscription for their local PC's.
Then there is the issue that Windows Server is only on LTSC (or at least is via OnPremise), but used to be on LTSC & SAC. Whereas Windows 10/11 is on LTSC and also Modern (Azure Virtual Desktop etc).
Finally there are the rumours that Windows Server GUI mode will be deprecated (indeed I believe Microsoft has announced that Windows Desktop code is now on a different track to Windows Server code). As Elden_Christensen highlights - Azure Stack HCI is based on Windows Core - the future is no doubt a GUI less Server product based around Powershell (or Azure) . So to the mere layman like me (and most others here), it would suggest that the simplest answer for all is to release Microsoft Windows Pro/Enterprise Multi-Session to run on Windows Core Hyper-V/HCI (or any other Hypervisor such as VMWare/Nuttanix etc). Thereby allowing the virtualisation layer to elegantly disconnect the LTSC and Modern servicing channels completely.
(Although I should add that Microsoft also didn't support Office 365/Microsoft 365 on Windows Server 2019 when it was first released, and then updated their policies, perhaps due to similar peer pressure)
AJS10Yeah, I get what you're saying. It's just all kind of annoying though considering most enterprise users would be more than fine with an Office 365 that moved as slow as LTSC does but licensed through 365 - in fact they'd prefer it, because the interface wouldn't change every year, moving buttons and Search fields, etc. And I guess tie that LTSC Office with Windows Server and force an upgrade every 5 years instead of 10 still would be fine. No one is clamoring for Office 365 to change so quickly that it can't use Windows Sever GUI as a base. So I'm not exactly excited or happy to know that MS wants to get rid of it. But I guess they are, and we'll have to some how move our user profiles from RDS hosts to Windows 11 multi-session, but a lot of our smaller clients just can't afford to do that on Azure, or license Azure Stack HCI when they already invested in Nutanix or VMware or many of the other smaller companies making qemu/KVM-based stacks. It's got to be hyper-visor independent and not add the additional complexity (and subscription licensing!) of Azure Stack like you said.