Business Applications and Services

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

The Office suite, Exchange Server, and Lync Server (renamed Skype for Business Server) will receive updates in the second half of 2015. SharePoint Server and Project Server will receive updates in the first half of 2016. The two waves of on-premises software versions will incorporate some of the recent and planned improvements of Microsoft’s Office 365 hosted services and subscription software, which the company updates continuously.

The next versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Project Server will require recent or planned versions of Windows Server and SQL Server, so many organizations will have to upgrade infrastructure to deploy them on-premises. (See the illustration “Application Versions Supported on Recent Platforms“.)

Office Clients

The Office suite, Microsoft’s most widely used client application for business, enables document editing, data access and manipulation, e-mail, presentations, and collaboration. Office suites include combinations of the following applications:

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