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Well, it has happened again. Microsoft is making technology decisions for you. Office 2016 is alive and kicking.

You may not care about this but trust me, this WILL impact your business. Microsoft is so dominant in the market that they can make a single product change and create a frenzy for an entire industry.

Why should you care?

For an individual employee or person, you may not be concerned that Office 2016 is out. But if you are thinking about your business, you should care.

How many of you were challenged by your IT provider to replace your existing Windows XP computers? What about your existing Windows 2003 servers? Did you understand the need for this? “Sure the technology is old, but it works.” “Of course your server is still operational but yes, you do need to replace this.” Or how about, “I realize you have a legacy application that still only uses Windows XP but this has to be changed.” Does any of this sound familiar?

If you said yes to any of these be prepared because with the release of Office 2016, Microsoft is showing its dominance and forcing you to this.

Don’t be complacent and think you can make this decision later. Within the last few weeks Dell has started shipping all computers with Office 2016 and made this necessary. Additionally, O365 is changing over to Office 2016 starting in Q1.

Do you have the same Office version for all of your production computers?

Do you have an application that ties in through some type of Office integration to work correctly?

Are you going to be able to use Office 2016 for these items?

What should you do?

First and foremost (and not to sound cliché), talk to your IT provider. You are running a business, not a tech factory, so don’t try to know all things IT. Trust in your IT provider to give you the correct solution.

Microsoft has several different licensing models for the Office packages:

• [icon type=”angle-double-right” class=”fa-li accent”]RETAIL- you can buy this off the shelf from a box store and transfer to other computers.
• [icon type=”angle-double-right” class=”fa-li accent”]OPEN- You buy this as a license and download and install on any system that you buy licenses for. This version also allows you to have downgrade rights to previous versions.
• [icon type=”angle-double-right” class=”fa-li accent”]OEM- Office is built into a computer when you buy this from a manufacturer. You are not able to transfer this to a different computer.
• [icon type=”angle-double-right” class=”fa-li accent”]O365- Premise and online application for Office 2016 that is a subscription model. Tired of reading yet?

Confused?

Software licensing is difficult and complex but you don’t become the 2nd richest man in the world for making it easy. Thanks, Mr. Gates.

Change is not bad

I found that the changes to Excel in Office 2013 were well worth the other differences I wasn’t sold on at first. Microsoft changed the color of the Outlook icon for the first time in the history of the product and I can’t tell you why. Office 2013 also brought in a custom background for each application by default and you had to disable this. Outlook 2013 also changed the views and made the email more difficult to deal with.

With all of this said, change is not bad. The cosmetic changes may not have been good but the functionality was great.

Microsoft is a company. Google is a company. However, Google is also a verb. In my humble opinion Microsoft is another noun besides a “company”, and that is “King.”

Thank you for reading,
The IRIS Solutions Team