Support ends for connections to Microsoft 365 services for Office 2016/2019 after October 2023

[German]Reminder to Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 users and administrators, if this isn't on your radar, as of October 2023, support for connections from Office apps to Microsoft 365 services will end. Connections will still be able to be made, but there will no longer be support for issues. The information is not new, I had already pointed it out in 2022. Recently, however, the information has come under my eyes again.

I was reminded of this via the following tweet; Microsoft has addressed it again in the support article Office versions and connectivity to Microsoft 365 services, which was last updated at the beginning of May 2023.

Microsoft has published the following table there, which lists the support of Office packages for connections to Microsoft 365 services depending on the version. These are, for example, connections with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.

Older Office versions may still be able to connect to Microsoft 365 services, Microsoft does not actively block anything. But these connections are no longer supported in Support. In practice, this means that these older versions of Office may not be able to use all the latest features and functionality of Microsoft 365 services. In addition, these older versions may experience unexpected performance or reliability issues when using Microsoft 365 services over time. This is because we do not consider or test with these older versions of Office when improving Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft writes that Office 2016 is no longer in mainstream support, but they made an exception until October 2023 for this version (was stated in a September 2018 blog post). Otherwise, it was already announced in 2017 that support for connections to Microsoft 365 services would only be provided for subscription solutions with Microsoft Office 365, or Microsoft 365 as it is called today.

I had already pointed this out at the end of July 2022 in the blog post Office 2016/2019 will lose access to Microsoft 365 starting October 2023. One option, of course, would be to switch to Microsoft Office 2021.