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
This is all far too complicated and it is not a typical use case to plan upgrades of RDS hosts each five years excactly. Many software companies don't have their applications ready for the newest OS in the beginning. Thus a migration would be happen 1 or 2 years after release and so the remaining run time would only be 3-4 years for the hosts. Usually you don't use Office on RDS hosts only, so upgrades/migrations are a lot of work as well and such a short support period of M365 Apps or even Office 2021 LTSC is more than questionable.
10 years of support were great, even 7 would be still fine but 5 or even shorter with M365 is really a mess. It is just a campaign to give RDS up, capitulate and book Azure virtual desktops for even more money.
The only thing who could stop this develpoment are antitrust authorities.
MI5-Agent I hear you, especially on not being able to upgrade to the latest OS until 1-2 years after release, so 5 years is reduced to 3-4 in the real world. In fairness to Microsoft, 5 years mainstream support has been their standard for quite some time, though software support has usually continued into the extended support period rather than dropping once mainstream support ends. However, 5 years support is better than none at all and being forced to W365 or AVD.
I think as customers we're caught between the waterfall/traditional licensed OS and ~agile/subscription licensed application worlds. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that, while Microsoft dogfoods their own software, they don't dogfood their own licensing and experience the same licensing conundrums their customers face. Perhaps a more continuous upgrade model OS like Azure Stack HCI could resolve the issue in the long run, though that doesn't help much today.