Microsoft will kill Office Online Server next year, creating a headache for anyone using on-premises Office web applications and the beleaguered holdouts sticking with Skype for Business Server.

The retirement is scheduled for December 31, 2026. After this, there won’t be any more security fixes, updates, or technical support from Microsoft. “This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernising productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions,” the company said.

Office Online Server provides browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for customers who want to keep things on-prem without having to roll out the full desktop applications. Microsoft’s solution is to move to Microsoft 365, its decidedly off-premises version of its applications. The company said it is “focusing its browser-based Office app investments on Office for the Web to deliver secure, collaborative, and feature-rich experiences through Microsoft 365.”

Other than migrating to another platform when the vendor pulls the plug, affected customers have few options.

The announcement will also hit several customers running SharePoint Server SE or Exchange Server SE. While those products remain supported, Office Online Server integration will go away. The company suggested Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Office LTSC 2024 as alternatives for viewing and editing documents hosted on those servers.

Skype for Business customers will also lose some key features related to PowerPoint. Presenter notes and high-fidelity PowerPoint rendering will go away. In-meeting annotations, which allow meeting participants to write directly to slides without altering the original file, will no longer be available, and embedded video playback will run at lower fidelity. Features like whiteboards, polls, and app sharing shouldn’t be affected.

Microsoft’s solution is a move to Teams, which the company says “offers modern meeting experiences.”

Office Online Server launched in 2016 and is the successor to Office Web Apps Server 2013. At the time, Microsoft said it “recognises that many organisations still value running server products on-premises for a variety of reasons.”

“With OOS [Office Online Server], you get the same functionality we offer with Office Online in your own datacenter.”

There is currently no successor for Office Online Server. Few users may know it exists, but the fact that it is retiring is going to hurt those who prefer to keep data and processing on-premises without touching Office LTSC 2024.

Windows 10 has officially reached its end-of-life status (EoL), meaning it will no longer receive crucial security updates, important improvements, or upgrades.

Despite the deadline being public knowledge for years, many endpoints worldwide are still running the OS, risking device takeover, data exfiltration, and a myriad of other threats that are bound to appear sooner or later.

Coinciding with the EoL date, two companies analysed the market to understand just how big the potential threat landscape is, and came back with astonishing results. Cloudhouse surveyed 135 finance IT leaders and found 60% still running “a large number” of servers and desktops with unsupported versions of Windows OS.

A new survey has revealed that a good number of people plan to continue using Windows 10 even after Microsoft officially ends support this month. Support for Windows 10 will stop on October 14, 2025, which means the operating system will no longer receive important security updates or fixes.

This transition even expected to lead to millions of obsolete devices and £1.8bn of e-waste in the UK alone. Despite this, a large number of users still aren’t planning to upgrade to Windows 11 or switch to another system.

The European Commission has launched a formal investigation into SAP’s behaviour in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services in Europe.

Following a preliminary investigation, the executive branch of the European Union said there were grounds to consider whether the enterprise application behemoth may have distorted competition in the lucrative aftermarket for on-prem software support.

In a prepared statement, Teresa Ribera, EC executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition, said: “Thousands of companies across Europe use SAP’s software to run their business, as well as its related maintenance and support services. We are concerned that SAP may have restricted competition in this crucial aftermarket, by making it harder for rivals to compete, leaving European customers with fewer choices and higher costs.

“This is why we want to have a closer look at SAP’s potentially distortive business practices, to make sure that companies that rely on SAP’s software can freely choose the maintenance and support services that best fits their business needs.”

An SAP spokesperson said that the new proceedings are based on maintenance and support policies that follow well-worn standards that are common across the global software sector. “SAP believes that its policies and actions are fully in line with competition rules. However, we take the issues raised seriously and are working closely with the Commission to resolve them,” they said.

SAP said it did not expect its engagement with the EC would result in material impacts on its financial performance.

“As a major European player in a very dynamic global industry, SAP is committed to open competition. We trust the European Commission will aim for a quick and fair conclusion to these proceedings,” the spokesperson said.

The Commission’s concerns, resulting from the early investigation, include SAP’s requirement that customers seek maintenance and support services from SAP for all their SAP on-premises ERP software, and choose the same type of maintenance and support under the same pricing conditions for all their SAP on-premises ERP software. The EC argues that this may stop customers from “mixing and matching” services from different suppliers at different prices and support levels.

The EC also said that SAP prevents customers from terminating maintenance and support services for unused software licenses, which it argues could result in customers paying for unwanted services.

SAP also systematically extends the initial term of on-premises ERP licenses without allowing termination of maintenance and support, the EC said.

Additionally, the Commission took issue with the fact that SAP charges for reinstating maintenance deals and allegedly for back-maintenance if customers take a break from SAP support arrangements.

“In some cases, these fees correspond to the amount customers would have paid if they had stayed with SAP all along,” the EC said.

Valued at about €275 billion, SAP is the dominant supplier of enterprise software in Europe, with many of the continent’s largest manufacturers and industrial companies relying on its ERP systems. Since early 2021, it has been pushing a strategic initiative to move customers to the cloud and Software-as-a-Service. The company has said it will not offer mainstream support for widely used legacy ERP system ECC beyond 2027 and only offer extended support – at a 2 percent premium – until the end of 2030.

While third-party support is available for SAP systems, German-speaking user group DSAG said recently that users should be aware they might lose out on discounts should they wish to rejoin the vendor’s upgrade path.

Microsoft’s advertised end-of-support date for Windows 10 is October 14, 2025. But in reality, the company will gradually wind down support for the enduring popular operating system over the next three years. Microsoft would really like you to upgrade to Windows 11, especially if it also means upgrading to a new PC, but it also doesn’t want to leave hundreds of millions of home and business PCs totally unprotected.

Those competing goals have led to lots of announcements and re-announcements and clarifications about updates for both Windows 10 itself and the Office/Microsoft 365 productivity apps that many Windows users run on their PCs.

The latest addition to the pile comes via an update to a support document that outlined when Windows 10 PCs would stop receiving new features for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 apps. Most home users will stop getting new features in August 2026, while business users running the Enterprise versions can expect to stop seeing new features in either October 2026 or January 2027, depending on the product they’re using.

Microsoft had previously committed to supporting its Office apps through October 2028—both the Microsoft 365 versions and perpetually licensed versions like Office 2021 and Office 2024 that don’t get continuous feature updates. That timeline isn’t changing, but it will apparently only cover security and bug-fixing updates rather than updates that add new features.

And while the apps will still be getting updates, Microsoft’s support document makes it clear that users won’t always be able to get fixes for bugs that are unique to Windows 10. If an Office issue exists solely on Windows 10 but not on Windows 11, the official guidance from Microsoft support is that users should upgrade to Windows 11; any support for Windows 10 will be limited to “troubleshooting assistance only,” and “technical workarounds might be limited or unavailable.”

To gather it all into one place, here are all the major things to know about continuing to use Windows 10 after this October: