Office Apps connectivity to Microsoft 365 services

Microsoft 365 services are the online services which are connected to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Suite features, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint online and OneDrive for Business. Most customers who use those online services, are using the Office Apps, like Outlook, Word or Excel to connect to those services. The question is, can you use any version of the Office applications to connect to those services?

Mainstream support

Actually, you can. But only Office applications which are in mainstream support – which is the first five years after the product became available, are supported. With that, and knowing that for Office 2019, this end-of-support date is October 10, 2023, it might be time to upgrade or migrate. Remarkable: Office 2016 is supposed to be ‘no longer supported’, but Microsoft made an exception; end date is – also – October 10, 2023.

Will it stop working?

Does this mean that older Office versions cannot be used with these online services? No. You can still connect, but it is not supported by Microsoft. And since Microsoft is continuously improving the online service, it also means that over time you might experience malfunction or are not able to use every feature in the online service. More information in this Microsoft learn article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/endofsupport/microsoft-365-services-connectivity.

How about Microsoft 365 Apps?

The Office Apps – Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise or for Business – do have the modern lifecycle for support, which is roughly 15 months. You can recognize these ‘versions’ (example) as ‘2301’, which is the January 2023 release. As long as you are using ‘in support’ Microsoft Apps, the connection to the online services is supported. Again, you can find more information on Microsoft Learn https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-microsoft365-apps-by-date#supported-versions.