Office 365 and Client Software Support

Some PCs accessing Office 365 services will need upgrades in 2015 according to current support policy. Shown here are the possible release and retirement roadmaps for two important pieces of client software that affect support of Office 365 services: the Office suite (which includes the Outlook e-mail client) and Internet Explorer (IE).

Microsoft states that it only supports Office 365 services with Office desktop suite versions that are in the Mainstream support phase. Office 2010 leaves Mainstream support Oct. 13, 2015, so PCs running that version will require upgrades to Office 2013 or the next version (labeled Office 16 here) by that date to retain support for Office 365. Microsoft also states that it only supports the most recent service pack for an Office version, although it gives customers 12 months to deploy each service pack. The policy means that customers using Office 2013 with Office 365 will need to deploy Office 2013 SP1 by Apr. 14, 2015, to retain support.

IE releases also affect support for PCs where that browser is used with Office 365. Currently, Microsoft supports Office 365 with IE’s two most recent versions, IE10 and IE11, as of Nov. 2014. (Similar policies apply to other browsers: Office 365 is supported with the two most recent versions of Firefox and the most recent versions of Chrome and Safari.) In a recent change to the support policy, Microsoft stated that beginning on Jan. 12, 2016, only the most recent version of IE available for any supported OS will receive technical support and security updates. Assuming that Microsoft updates IE annually for all supported OSs, organizations will need to update IE clients every year to retain support with Office 365.