Outlook and Office Products may fail connecting to Office 365 in October 2020
Something we have seen that may have been missed by many customers and admins is a quietly published article about Microsoft support for the Office Suite in 2020 (a little more than a year from now!).
This article was found by reviewing the Office 365 Message Center articles back in 2017. Unfortunately, the default view provided by this feature only shows the last few months of articles and the one from 2017 no longer appears.
The article that was posted seems harmless at the time and had a simple statement about Office 365 support in 2020. Most people in our experience never saw this article.
The article indicated that in 2020, Office products that would be used to connect to Office 365 would only be supported and usable by the then current version of Office that was installed from your Office 365 tenant. Our reading interprets this to mean that possibly the retail versions of the Office product will not be usable against Office 365, even if it were the most recent version (Office 2019 as of today).
We suggest all customers of Office 365 to continually review the “Message Center” messages that are posted as well as the “Service Health” advisories. Many changes to Office 365 are announced thru the Message Center, but many changes that can have considerable impact on the enterprise are not announced with any loud or attention-grabbing fanfare. In addition, given that Microsoft may announce changes that are many years in advance of the actual change, such announcements will fall out of view in a few months.
Here are some of the specific details regarding the changes that are scheduled for the latter half of 2020:
Ready to Talk Through Your Migration?
Priasoft has been handling Exchange and Microsoft 365 migrations since 1999. Whether you're scoping a new project or recovering from a stalled one, our engineers have seen it before. No sales pitch — just a working conversation with people who have done this work at scale.
