Office 365 ProPlus Servicing Roadmap

Office 2016 brings a new set of release and servicing processes that deliver feature updates more frequently than in the past. Feature updates are entire releases of Office that deliver new functionality to existing instances of the software.

Customers running Office Professional Plus continue to have Mainstream and Extended support periods offered with earlier versions of Office and that allow feature updates to be deferred for the supported life cycle of that release. However, Office Professional Plus clients will not be supported with related Office 365 services (such as Exchange Online) in Extended support.

The Deferred Channel (previously Current Branch for Business) allows organizations running Office 365 ProPlus a way to defer feature updates for up to four months and retain support of that install (deferring additional feature updates) for a minimum of eight months. Deferred Channel customers receive the latest selected Current Channel versions of Office 365 ProPlus as indicated by the arrows in this illustration. The first Deferred Channel updates were released in Feb. 2016 and the next Deferred Channel update is scheduled for June 2016.