Ahead of the launch of Windows 11 in October, Microsoft has made its Microsoft Office Long Servicing Channel available to commercial and government customers.

The Microsoft Office Long Servicing Channel is the firm’s convoluted way of saying that you will only need to purchase Microsoft Office once and you won’t need to pay a monthly subscription.

“Office LTSC is designed for specific scenarios: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates, process control devices on the manufacturing floor, and specialty systems that cannot connect to the internet,” explains corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro.

“To meet this need, Office LTSC will provide a locked-in-time version of familiar productivity tools. While it offers performance improvements and expanded accessibility, it will not offer the cloud-based capabilities of Microsoft 365 Apps like real-time collaboration and AI-driven automation in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as security and compliance capabilities that give added confidence in a hybrid world,” Spataro added.

For more information on volume licensing of Office LTSC 2021, head here.

The good news is that this one-time purchase of Office will be made available to consumers as Office 2021 which will launch on 5th October 2021.

There is no word on pricing just yet.

This version of Office will be supported for five years and while Spataro says this isn’t the last perpetual release from Microsoft, it’s clear the company really wants you to subscribe to Microsoft 365.

We should mention that if you want a good, free alternative to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice (formerly OpenOffice) is feature-rich and we are yet to encounter a task we couldn’t complete using it. You can read more about LibreOffice here.

[Source – Microsoft]