Office 365 ProPlus will now be supported on the new Windows Server 2019 RDS!!

Yes – you read it alright!

In April I wrote this:

What reasons Microsoft had in their heads, when stating this, is to me, unclear 🙁

Here are some articles about it:

Greymatter:
https://www.greymatter.com/corporate/news/microsoft-drop-office-365-proplus-support-windows-server-2019-rdsh/

Compares/SoftwareOne:
https://comparex.com/en/blog/all-articles/2019/01/17/microsoft-office-365-proplus-on-windows-server-2019

Office 365 UserVoice:
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/264636-general/suggestions/35642482-office-365-support-for-windows-server-2019?page=1&per_page=20

What to do?? (Greymatter):

• Run Windows Server 2016 (or a prior version until its support end date) rather than Windows Server 2019, Microsoft have extended Office 365 ProPlus support on Windows Server 2016 until October 2025, from January 2020.
• Use Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) on Azure which offers multi-user Windows 10 session capabilities and will support Office 365 natively, this is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2019.
• For companies using Microsoft products to deliver its hosted Software Services to customers you can use Office ProPlus licensed under Microsoft SPLA, other licensing agreements don’t permit installation of Office on shared 3rd party cloud VMs
• Run Office locally on the users’ PCs rather than on Windows Server 2019 RDSH.

Hooray – NOT!!….

But its WRONG, Microsoft finally came to their senses and changed it all 1.July 2019 🙂

Microsoft 365 is designed to help organizations digitally transform workplace collaboration. Many customers that I work with use virtualization, and they’re always looking for ways to cut costs and improve the user experience. To help, we acquired FSLogix last November, and today I’m pleased to announce four new capabilities to further improve the user experience in virtualized environments:

• FSLogix technology, which improves the performance of Office 365 ProPlus in multi-user virtual environments, is now available at no additional cost for Microsoft 365 customers.

• Windows Server 2019 will add support for OneDrive Files On-Demand in the coming months.

• Office 365 ProPlus, our flagship Office experience, will be supported on Windows Server 2019.

• And we’ve added new capabilities to Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams in Office 365 ProPlus to improve the user experience in a virtualized environment.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2019/07/01/improving-office-app-experience-virtual-environments/