At its last Ignite conference in September, Microsoft caused a stir by announcing that the next version of Exchange would be available as a subscription only, and no longer as a perpetual license as has always been the case for Microsoft products. The current On Premise versions will continue to be maintained for some time, but without further major development or addition of flagship functionality, unlike the cloud version, which the Redmond company seems to want to push.
Far from being trivial, this announcement suggests the evolution of the licensing of the Office suite, often sold in addition to Exchange solutions, and given the close links between the client side and the server side of the solutions of the Office environment.
Until now, the releases of new versions of Office have always been based on those of Exchange, as have the durations of their support.
How can we imagine such a radical paradigm shift for Exchange without repercussions on the licensing of the Office suite?
Even if Microsoft has not formally pronounced itself on the future of the Office suite, we are entitled to think that, like Exchange, Office will gradually switch to a subscription system, in order to preserve the stability and consistency of the system. Microsoft’s server / client ecosystem.
The gradual shift from Microsoft’s flagship solutions to a subscription model seems to establish the cloud as the essential foundation of enterprise computing in the coming decades.
Source : Le Monde Informatique