Microsoft Puts Office Online Server On the Chopping Block 50
Microsoft is retiring Office Online Server on December 31, 2026, ending support and updates for organizations running browser-based Office apps on-premises. The Register reports: After this, there won't be any more security fixes, updates, or technical support from Microsoft. "This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions," the company said. Office Online Server provides browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for customers who want to keep things on-prem without having to roll out the full desktop applications. Microsoft's solution is to move to Microsoft 365, its decidedly off-premises version of its applications. The company said it is "focusing its browser-based Office app investments on Office for the Web to deliver secure, collaborative, and feature-rich experiences through Microsoft 365."
Other than migrating to another platform when the vendor pulls the plug, affected customers have few options. The announcement will also hit several customers running SharePoint Server SE or Exchange Server SE. While those products remain supported, Office Online Server integration will go away. The company suggested Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as alternatives for viewing and editing documents hosted on those servers.
Skype for Business customers will also lose some key features related to PowerPoint. Presenter notes and high-fidelity PowerPoint rendering will go away. In-meeting annotations, which allow meeting participants to write directly to slides without altering the original file, will no longer be available, and embedded video playback will run at lower fidelity. Features like whiteboards, polls, and app sharing shouldn't be affected. Microsoft's solution is a move to Teams, which the company says "offers modern meeting experiences."
Other than migrating to another platform when the vendor pulls the plug, affected customers have few options. The announcement will also hit several customers running SharePoint Server SE or Exchange Server SE. While those products remain supported, Office Online Server integration will go away. The company suggested Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as alternatives for viewing and editing documents hosted on those servers.
Skype for Business customers will also lose some key features related to PowerPoint. Presenter notes and high-fidelity PowerPoint rendering will go away. In-meeting annotations, which allow meeting participants to write directly to slides without altering the original file, will no longer be available, and embedded video playback will run at lower fidelity. Features like whiteboards, polls, and app sharing shouldn't be affected. Microsoft's solution is a move to Teams, which the company says "offers modern meeting experiences."
Sure MS missed the news (Score:2)
Or the West Coast cares less about what happens on East Coast of the USoA. How bad things can be when everything runs at their own computers instead of the end user computer?
subscriptions for everything, you will own nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll be a Microsoft subscription slave for all eternity.
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You'll be a Microsoft subscription slave for all eternity.
At some point you're just killing your own Excel junkies with supermeth-powered vape hits from the mandatory BigCloudz provider, and Excel is one of the last corporate vestiges.
AWS down for a few hours was quite horrific when measured on every liars tax-deducting financial impact statement. You think that stock market is going to remain standing when one of the members of the Not-So-Magnificent Seven goes offline next time for a week? Take AWS/Microsoft offline for the next month and tell me cloud outages
Remember how Sears used to be a thing? (Score:2)
They were the retail juggernaut. Now they barely exist. They were too big to fail, and yet they did.
Re: Remember how Sears used to be a thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sears did not "fail", they were willfully destroyed by a vulture capitalist.
That's like comparing In-and-Out to McDonald's (Score:4, Interesting)
JC Penney isn't doing great these days. Sears would not be much better off. Both of these lost their middle-class customers to other stores and online shopping and their costs are much too high to service low-income customers.
Sears had a different audience than JCPenny. Sears was a beloved tool retailer with a cult following and well regarded for their appliances. JCPenny was a place for cheap clothes that are higher quality than WalMart. To me, that's like comparing In & Out to McDonald's. They have superficial similarities, but one was beloved and the other was "just fine." Sears appealed to dads and was a treat for many working class dads to go to. If they were well run, they'd be vibrant today. JCPenny...their primary audience was moms buying clothes. No one "wanted" to go there. It was just cheaper than Macy's or Dillard's (or whatever your better anchor mall store was).
If Sears removed themselves from the mall and invested in quality tools, perhaps appliances, they could develop a nice niche. HarborFreight has gone from the shittiest tool seller to trying to be Sears now...offering a 1st party comprehensive lineup and is thriving, from what I can tell
No one wants to buy clothes from Sears. However, they could easily take customers from Harbor Frieght, Lowes, Home Depot, Best Buy, etc...cater to older dads...give a nice experience...be convenient to get to (malls suck today)...resurrect their tires service and make it compelling.
Dads are underserved. Sears could really appeal to that market. 30 years ago, dads in the midwest LOVED Sears for the manly stuff and ignore the weird clothes section.
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JC Penney isn't doing great these days. Sears would not be much better off. Both of these lost their middle-class customers to other stores and online shopping and their costs are much too high to service low-income customers.
Sears had a different audience than JCPenny. Sears was a beloved tool retailer with a cult following and well regarded for their appliances. JCPenny was a place for cheap clothes that are higher quality than WalMart. To me, that's like comparing In & Out to McDonald's.
I don't know what era you grew up in, but when I was a child, Sears and Pennys were direct competitors. Sears just had a better catalog and automotive section. People going to malls would go to both to see who had the better deal on competing items. Especially for clothing. Montgomery Ward was a competitor, but they were the Chrysler to Sears/Penney's GM and Ford, the third wheel that no one went to first.
Look around old men's garages (Score:2)
I don't know what era you grew up in, but when I was a child, Sears and Pennys were direct competitors. Sears just had a better catalog and automotive section. People going to malls would go to both to see who had the better deal on competing items. Especially for clothing. Montgomery Ward was a competitor, but they were the Chrysler to Sears/Penney's GM and Ford, the third wheel that no one went to first.
They were only superficial competitors. I think JCPenny was clothes and maybe housewares. Sears was the only major mall chain to have tools and they were beloved. In the midwest, we had other stores as well, but the anchor stores were mostly selling clothes, perfume, jewelry, etc. Malls were pretty much for women, with the exception of Sears...a refuge for dads to hang out while their wives and daughters went shopping. It was also a good place to get a new washer/dryer, microwave, etc.
I love tools.
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My local Sears (in the Capitola Mall) had all kinds of departments. They did tires and batteries, had sizable camping and exercise equipment sections, a fairly decent electronics section with I think three different computers, appliances, housewares, jewelry and watches, and probably some other things I'm forgetting besides clothing obviously. And they had a fairly active catalog and layaway department, as Sears still had a fairly large catalog at the time. They were fairly easy to deal with, their prices w
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After they had already failed... (Score:1)
Healthy companies aren't acquired by the scrappers.
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Damn that is some wishful just-world projection.
In a world where there weren't hedge funds hundreds of times bigger than your few remaining mom & pop stores, maybe this would be a meaningful statement. Now, it just highlights how people like you defend the status quo by explaining that actually bad things can't happen to good people.
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Sears used to own a bunch of real estate and a trucking fleet. This let them ship things anywhere in the country in a reasonably timely fashion and keep costs low on both ends. They did absolutely, pathetically flub web sales, but it really wasn't too late to fix that. They at least had done the work of getting the product information digitized, even if the web site was otherwise a loss. (It really was terrible, and so were the prices, wtf.)
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Sears got their big start with their catalog sales. They dumped the catalog just as internet selling was starting. They could have been an online juggernaut like Amazon if they did a good job of converting the catalog to internet sales instead of dumping it.
They couldn't pick a strategy and kee
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Sears did not "fail", they were willfully destroyed by a vulture capitalist.
Sears fate was sealed the moment Amazon was created. The "vulture capitalist" just squeezed what value he could from the dying remains. With their catalogue business, and being "America's general store", they were in the perfect position to move from paper catalog to Internet based ordering. They adapted too late. Malls and physical department stores are never coming back at a level necessary for a Sears to thrive. It's Amazon and everyone else now.
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Sears fate was sealed the moment Amazon was created.
I don't agree. As long as they still had real estate and shipping, they were in a position to make a comeback if they only demonstrated some competence. But instead of that, the real estate was sold off and the web site was never made not trash. As I recall they mostly hung on to the shipping and did some deals there, and they also had a line of business doing largely incompetent repair work, but selling the property was a huge failure.
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They were the retail juggernaut. Now they barely exist. They were too big to fail, and yet they did.
Meh, bad timing was their only fault.
They were actually Too Big To Fail at some point. Society wasn't quite corrupt enough to support the kind of financial fuckery that keeps companies like GM in business today, while allowing companies like Sears to fall over and die.
Some customers may be in a legal bind (Score:3, Informative)
Some customers may not be able to move their data off-prem without violating existing contracts or the law.
I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft. Even that will go unsupported in 2029.
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"I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft" or they can just ignore the issue and blissfully send their money to Microsoft.
In some parts of Europe, that would mean executives getting punished personally if caught.
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I guess they will have to go with Office 2024 LTSC or go non-Microsoft. Even that will go unsupported in 2029.
Going with a locally installed Office suite that has four years of support matches the refresh cycle many companies have for computers. At some point Microsoft will introduce a Office 2028 LTSC with another four year cycle and enterprise customers will start installing that on their newly imaged computers. There will always be a market for locally installed Office with in-house data storage customers.
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Or... maybe just run a pre-cloudized version of Office (I run Office 2016)... never needed M$ support for anything. I also run Win10 Enterprise IoT LTSC, and I'm not moving to a newer version until they get rid of the Mac-like interface.
I save my stuff to Google Drive, which stores local copies on both Windows computers in my apartment, and on ma's laptop (off-site).
I don't see a need to pay a subscription fee to be able to run Office Word, after buying the license to run it, and needing a good internet to
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Some customers may not be able to move their data off-prem without violating existing contracts or the law.
Unlikely. Microsoft's corporate cloud services not only comply with HIPAA like requirements in virtually every country they operate, they also provide those services for governments themselves.
Virtually no laws require data to be held "on premises", but a few do require it in country.
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Virtually no laws require data to be held "on premises", but a few do require it in country.
Not directly but HIPAA requires everyone who has access to the data must be cleared first. When the data is in the cloud, a company has less control over the access of their cloud provider. Adding to that is complication of things like notices of breaches.
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And again, Microsoft's cloud services are completely HIPAA compliant. This isn't your consumer OneDrive.
Nadella is missing the mark here (Score:4, Interesting)
Open source solutions for most things have surpassed Microsoft's Windows Server platform to the point that Windows Server is effectively dead except in very specific circumstances. Over the next decade that will continue to grow to be a thing, and further financial investment in open source platforms will eventually catch up to cloud products as over time people and companies continue to invest in developing on-premises solutions to replace the ones Microsoft is ignoring.
We are starting to see the cracks in cloud compute. On-premises compute support is growing again as companies realize it's actually cheaper to run all of this random bullshit on some shared hardware than to spend tens of thousands of dollars per month on cloud compute spend.
Sovereign clouds are growing and becoming more of a thing. And the day that Microsoft, AWS, or Google is forced by the United States government to turn over information in a European cloud to the US government will spell the end for massive generalized cloud computing. These major cloud vendors ignored the fact that they've been riding the coattails of trust the world has had in the United States government to trend towards more progress and freedom. And that's clearly not going to be the case anymore.
Broadcom's push to basically force everyone off of VMWare is massively modernizing software which companies still want to run on-premises but moving them all to bare metal k8s nodes. Reducing VMWare licensing will have a direct impact on how many Windows servers exist across the world.
Nadella has put next to no investment in Windows except for chasing AI bullshit. Which itself is already showing cracks with Meta's recent layoffs in AI.
All of this focus on AI and Cloud, both of which are going to be massively reduced over the next 10 years, along with modernizing software to run in containers and getting away from traditional VMs driven by Broadcom's licensing onsense, will make Microsoft virtually irrelevant as soon as someone releases a comparable Office and Exchange stack you can run on-prem again.
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As someone that's creating yet another linux VM at an "all Windows" shop that also prefers to buy macbooks rather than Windows 11 devices because they have fewer weird problems, Microsoft is screwed. The big sell of Windows was you had some level of centralized management built-in if you were in a domain environment. Was it perfect? No. Did it solve all problems? Not even close, but it got you half way.
The cloud-first and now cloud-only yet-another-subscription approach has diluted Microsoft's position. If
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'Install *Nix, configure it your way, install a VM program, install Windows in the VM program, install MS Office in VM'... so, what did you gain.
If LibreOffice opened .docx files correctly, and other stuff that needs Windows worked in *Nix 100%, more people would move to it.
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Indeed. Although that "Office stack" already exists (LibreOffice) and who needs Exchange to begin with?
At the moment all that is keeping MS alive is momentum. But their usability and security are getting worse and, at least in Europe, o365 is actually not legal to use for privacy-relevant data in many cases. The legal system has just not yet caught up with many of these uses.
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I think it's time Microsoft replaces Nadella. He's failing in the same way that Ballmer failed
On what basis? You say a lot of words in your post but you missed the key important ones: The share price is $2 off its all time peak that set just a few months ago, and Microsoft has outperformed the rest of the market.
Nadella is doing a truly amazing job. Remember his job is to raise the share price.
Open source solutions for most things have surpassed Microsoft's Windows Server platform to the point that Windows Server is effectively dead except in very specific circumstances.
WTF is a Windows server? Is that like the legacy version of Microsoft Entra ID? You're using all these terms in the past to talk about the present. Microsoft don't make money selling "Windows Server" they make
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You're viewing this from completely the wrong angle.
The fact that Azure is popular isn't a coincidence. It's in part because it's the easiest thing to get to from Windows, and Windows is still dominant in business and government. As you say, integration.
So if you're using less Windows at home, Azure is less appealing. There's still a case for it, you might still choose to use it etc, it's just less likely. That's why whether the customers are running Windows or not matters. And Windows is becoming steadily more offensive — can you ever trust it with yo
Translation service (Score:5, Insightful)
"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions,"
Translation:
"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring everybody is paying us a monthly subscription fee."
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"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing recurring revenue and feeding every document we can find to the robots"
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Yep. And anybody is fucked if their servers go down or their cloud gets hacked again.
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"This change is part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring everybody is paying us a monthly subscription fee."
Not really. The people this affects are almost exclusively customers who have been paying a subscription fee since the 90s when it was introduced as part of the MSDN subscription. I'm not sure you can even buy outright a single version of the product they are depreciating.
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Bingo, that's what "modernization" means... ensuring that you pay through the nose and thank them for the opportunity.
Typewriters and adding machines that's the future! (Score:1)
Save the electricity for the mimeograph machine
Or maybe we can just port DOS and WordPerfect 5 over to ARM or something
*sigh* It's so easy to fleece people, rich and poor alike. When the power goes out, we're gonna be in a big heap of trouble
This will be interesting (Score:2)
I know of one pretty large bank that cannot move to o365, because that would be illegal. (Data has to stay under their control....)
Maybe they will go LibreOffice, nothing really to prevent them from that.
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They're not forced to move to Microsoft 365 as I'm guessing that they won't have deployed Office Online Server anyway, they will have the native desktop apps installed instead.
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Last I knew they were moving to all web-apps with web-terminals for everybody.
Re: This will be interesting (Score:2)
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I bet you it's not. Microsoft corporate cloud is not the same OneDrive that is shoved down our throats and it already complies with all manner of legal requirements from financial laws and laws such as HIPAA.
I suspect you don't know the specifics of the law, the specifics of the cloud offering, or more likely, neither.
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I suspect you don't know the specifics of the law, the specifics of the cloud offering, or more likely, neither.
As usual, you try to elevate your crappy person by trying to put somebody else down. Well done. Obviously, you have nothing.
Incidentally, I have done audits with respect to that law and it is quite simple and clear. Even you could understand it. Maybe.
Too Much Privacy (Score:2)
Microsoft cannot abide the idea of any person -- or, apparently, any company -- actually running things that Microsoft is unable to snoop into. They demand full access to everything in exchange for using their software.
Another step forward to being replaced (Score:2)
by LibreOffice [libreoffice.org]
Many European governments have already weened themselves off of Microsoft because of the Draconian policies that make their online products completely untenable. Microsoft has been trying hard to completely alienate their customer base, and making the on-site products unavailable will be the final blow for many companies. Any organization that works with classified materials will find a quick exit, and any company with confidential data will follow quickly.
RIP Microsoft