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Support for M365 Apps (O365) on Windows 2022
We have a large number of Windows Server 2016 with M365 Apps (O365) and need to upgrade these servers now (end of support for WS2016 is Jan 2022).
The next server product to install for us would be Windows Server 2022, unfortunately there is no support for M365 apps (O365).
In general, it looks like the support of M365 Apps for Server OS will be discontinued 2025.
We want to get a statement from Microsoft as to whether Microsoft intends to support M365 Apps (O365) on Windows Server 2022 at some point.
Now we have to make a strategic decision.
The time is not long until 2025!
The way is not to AVD or Microsoft Azure HCI, but the way is away from the concept of application (or desktop) "remoting" and thus we as customers are no longer available for AVD and Windows 365!
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
- Mary Hoffman
Microsoft
Thank you for your question.
M365 Apps is supported on Windows Server 2016 & 2019 through October 2025 (see the support matrix at https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE2OqRI).- There are no plans to auppprt on-prem, is basically what is being stated here. Yes? Interesting decision to throw away all those dark site, grey site and black site dollars.
Will Office volume license edition be supported? I find this move a little bit strange, many companies are relying on Office 365 on Remote Desktop Services. You can't expect all of them to go to Azure, sometimes they even can't because of regulations. Another option would be to move to on-prem Windows 10/11 with Office 365 but that would take a lot more resources. Or maybe Windows 10/11 multi-user if that becomes available on-prem.
I'm not too worried though, MS did come back from its decisions before. Once the big companies start to complain that they need it and that they don't let them be pushed to Windows 365 MS will once again change its mind. You can't just kill this and leave a huge gap and try to force companies to the cloud. Same as forcing Edge on people, or the Windows 8 debacle, eventually it will just backfire.Many customers‘ workflows and solution setups deeply depend on hosting M365 Apps on their on premise server solutions. From my point of view there is simply no realistic possibility for moving the customers Remote Desktop services to AVD and not even W365. I do not understand Microsofts strategy behind this lifecycle concept. So the idea is if M365 Apps cannot be hosted on a supported client VM, customers need to migrate to Azure based hosting services?
What about AVD-on-HCI? The workload would still exist on-prem and you can leverage Windows 10 Multisession Hosts, keeping the VM count low.
Yes, there are a ton of questions still about licensing costs - the solution is not GA yet.
