Microsoft Office 2016 Officially Confirmed For September 22nd Release

Microsoft has finally has announced a September 22nd release for the latest version of Office and intends to implement a more vigorous upgrade schedule:

“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 2016—which is effectively the same feature set as the September 22^nd release, but with four additional months of security updates also included.”

There are a number of enhancements throughout Office 2016 including the background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) which helps to control network traffic when deploying new updates. On another note, you can easily recover loss information using Data Loss Prevention and employ Multi-factor Authentication. Currently, there’s no indication of the standalone office pricing but it could be fairly substantial as Microsoft tries to sell its subscription-based Office 365 software package. Also, with so many free options from Google Docs and Libreoffice, it’s difficult to get most consumers to purchase a genuine version of Office 2016.

Some power-users have also complained about Office 2013 user-interface so it will be interesting to see how-received the latest GUI is.  Personally, I’ll stick to using a combination of LibreOffice for local files and Google Docs for cloud sharing documents.

Thank you Engadget for providing us with this information.