Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline

Microsoft has released what could be the penultimate perpetual licensed version of Office.

Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 2024 was made available on September 16, drowned out by the company's Copilot "innovations".

Microsoft would much prefer customers went down the Microsoft 365 route, but has acknowledged that some users prefer stability over stockholder-pleasing subscriptions.

The release is aimed at Windows-using government and commercial customers and is to be supported for five years. It is a disconnected product, so many of the features of Microsoft 365 are unavailable, including cloud storage and the option to subscribe to Microsoft 365 Copilot for an additional fee. That said, while "extended offline access" in the Microsoft 365 world means a device must connect to the internet at least once every six months, a device running Office LTSC 2024 need never be attached to the outside world.

Microsoft published a table of stuff to show what users would be missing by going down the Office LTSC route. The big hitters include desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, but absent was anything that needs the cloud or web services, alongside Publisher, which is due to be deprecated in 2026.

Microsoft also said fresh on-premises versions of Project and Visio would be generally available to all customers by October 1.

In addition to dropping Publisher, Teams is also not preinstalled with Office LTSC 2024, and the Publish to Power BI feature has been stripped from Excel. ActiveX controls are also disabled by default, although administrators can re-enable them if necessary.

Perpetual licensing is not something Microsoft likes to talk about too much. It is currently the subject of legal action over incentives given to customers to move from perpetual licenses to Microsoft 365 subscriptions, as well as the subsequent fate of those perpetual licenses.

With the Office LTSC 2024's preview announcement, Microsoft committed to at least one more release, which will come before the end of this decade. Nothing has been definitively stated beyond that, although it is easy to imagine customer demand playing a part.

After all, Office LTSC 2024 only exists due to the requirements of some users that their devices do not connect to the internet, meaning Microsoft 365 and its cloud-based wizardry are simply not an option. ®