Microsoft to release Office 2021 and LTSC

By Elly Yates-Roberts on 19 February 2021

Microsoft

Microsoft is releasing updates to its Microsoft 365 productivity suite, in the form of Office 2021 and Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC).

Office 2021 – like the previous Office 2019 release – has been designed for personal and small business users who do not want to subscribe to the company's cloud service, Microsoft 365.

The new LTSC offer is designed to be a long-term, static option for the software used in “a limited set of specific situations”, says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365 in a recent blog post. These include “regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems that must stay locked in time and require a long-term servicing channel”.

“We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organisation, but only in specific scenarios,” said Spataro. “The good news is that you can deploy both Office LTSC and the Microsoft 365 version of Office with the same deployment tools.”

New Office LTSC features will include accessibility improvements, capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, dark mode support and performance improvements across Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.