Microsoft has officially announced that for Office 2016 for Windows will officially begin rolling out from September 22.
Office 365 Personal and Home subscribers will be able to manually download Office 2016 on that date, or they can wait for automatic updates to their apps to begin sometime in October.
If you have a volume licensing agreement in place, you can download Office 2016 from the Volume Licensing Service Center starting October 1st.
Business customers who are signed up for Office 365 ProPlus will have a new update option, Current Branch for Business, that will allow those users to wait a few months for feature updates to be released for Office 2016.
Microsoft stated:
“Consistent with Windows 10 approach, the new Current Branch for Business update model delivers three cumulative feature updates per year, while continuing to offer monthly security updates. You’ll see the first Current Branch for Business build in February 2016â€â€which is effectively the same feature set as the September 22nd release, but with four additional months of security updates also included. This tri-annual update model offers an additional way for Office 365 ProPlus to stay current moving forward.”
Microsoft have also addressed a number of the other top IT requests in Office 365 ProPlus, including deployment support for Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to help control network traffic when deploying updates and new reports on Office activation and usage available in the Office 365 admin portal.
Beyond the new deployment and management options, the new Office also adds support for Data Loss Prevention across the Office 2016 apps, Multi-factor Authentication and other mission critical control capabilities.
