Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of the final version of Microsoft Office LTSC 2024, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, OneNote, and Microsoft Access.
LTSC stands for Long-Term Servicing Channel and it denotes a version that doesn’t receive feature updates for a long while. As described by Microsoft, it’s a “locked-in-time” version that gets some of the features that were released since the last LTSC release, and it gets five years of support from the time it’s released.
As such, Microsoft Office LTSC versions are one-time purchase, have no subscription obligations, can only be installed on a single device per license, and don’t require internet connectivity.
However, it’s important to note that Microsoft Office LTSC is expressly meant for companies, not private users — LTSC licenses can only be acquired through volume licensing agreements.
After lengthy praise for Microsoft 365, the Redmond-based company is now ready to admit that there are still good reasons for a non-subscription version of Office. Microsoft writes:
“Still, we know that some customer scenarios require a different approach. Some devices must never be connected to the internet; others need to remain unchanged for years at a time. We remain committed to supporting our customers and these scenarios. Earlier this year, we offered a public preview of Microsoft Office Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 2024. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of this next perpetual version of Office for commercial and government customers.”
Microsoft will support Office LTSC 2024 for five years as part of the Fixed Lifecycle Policy. Office LTSC 2024 will not receive any feature updates, only security updates, and it offers the following benefits:
“Office LTSC 2024 offers a locked-in-time version of familiar productivity tools, updated with a subset of the features that have been added to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise over the last three years. New features for this release include Dynamic Charts and more than a dozen new text and array functions in Excel, enhanced search and meeting creation options in Outlook, and improvements to performance, security, and accessibility.”
At the bottom of this page, there’s a comparison of Microsoft 365 and Office LTSC 2024. Key benefits of Microsoft 365 include the ability to install apps on up to 5 devices, access to web app versions, eligibility for the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on, and 1TB of cloud storage.
Corporate customers can find the GVLKs for Office LTSC 2024 here. Microsoft Office 2024 is not yet available for home users.
Further reading: Everything you need to know about Microsoft 365
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
Author: Hans-Christian Dirscherl, Managing Editor, PC-WELT
Hans-Christian Dirscherl began his IT life with Autoexec.bat and config.sys, Turbo-Pascal and C, Sinix and Wordperfect. He has been writing on almost all IT topics for around 25 years, covering everything from news to reviews and buying guides.