Microsoft last week announced sweeping changes to Office’s support rules, which will push more corporate customers to the Office 365 subscription model.
The support policies introduced Thursday will cut in half the time that non-subscription versions of Office — usually labeled “perpetual” as a nod to the licenses which, once purchased, let customers run the software as long as they want — can connect to Microsoft cloud-based services. These include Microsoft-hosted Exchange email, the OneDrive for Business storage service and Skype for Business, the corporate edition of Microsoft’s video-calling service.
