On September 24, 2018 Microsoft announced the general availability release of Office 2019 for Windows and Mac for commercial volume license customers.
Office 2019 will be available to all other customers, consumer and commercial, in the next few weeks.
Regardless of Microsoft’s clear focus on the recurring revenue of its cloud products, it is apparent that there is still a strong market for customers that are not ready to make the jump to the cloud, and prefer to stick with an on-premise version. For these customers Office 2019 provides new features and updates to the applications included for both home users and IT professionals.
Office 2019 is the latest edition of Microsoft’s on premise version of the Office suite of products including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Project, Visio, Access and Publisher. Project 2019, Visio 2019, Access 2019, and Publisher 2019 are available for Windows only.
The commercial release of Office 2019 is aimed at volume-licensed commercial customers who have a specific need for on-premises or hybrid deployment, but want to have the latest version of Office applications.
With the release of Office 2019, on premise Office users will now have access to a superior list of features that have previously only been available to Office 365 subscription users.
Although Office 2019 will receive quality and security updates as required, Microsoft have confirmed that the product itself will be a one-off release and it will not see any further feature updates, whereas new features to the cloud version Office 365, will be made monthly. Despite their shift to cloud-based subscription services, Microsoft has stated however that Office 2019 won’t be its final on-premise release.
In the coming weeks, following the release of Office 2019 products we will also see the release of Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019.
What’s new in Office 2019?
- Word 2019 delivers new features themed around “getting work done easier”; include learning tools with captions and audio descriptions, text to speech feature, improved inking functionality and accessibility improvements.
- Outlook 2019 will offer users the ability to “manage email more efficiently”, with an update to contact cards, travel and delivery summary cards, Office 365 groups (which does requires an Exchange online account), the @mention functionality, and probably the most useful feature the focused inbox functionality, allowing you to move less important emails out of the way to focus on your business priorities.
- Excel 2019 promises to “perform better data analysis”, offering users PowerPivot and PowerQuery enhancements, the ability to publish Excel to PowerBI, along with new funnel charts, 2D maps, timelines and improved excel functions and connectors.
- PowerPoint 2019 will allow users to “create more impactful content”, creating cinematic presentations with its new Zoom slide ordering capabilities and Morph transition presentation features, along with the ability to insert and manage Icons, SVG, and 3D models.
- The improved inking features across the apps in Windows—like the roaming pencil case, pressure sensitivity, and tilt effects will allow users to naturally create documents.
Upgrading to Office 2019
The first point to note when considering your upgrade to 2019 is that Office 2019 is not supported on Windows 7 or Windows 8 platforms, it is only available to those customers that are already on the Windows 10 OS or one of the three most recent versions of macOS.
Any organisation wanting to take advantage of Office 2019’s new features will therefore need to have already upgraded to the latest operating system or will require an OS migration first.
For more information on system requirements, see: http://office.com/systemrequirements
For customers already on Windows 10 or a compatible version of macOS, the upgrade path for Office 2019 will require the previous version of Office to be uninstalled first, before installing Office 2019.
If you require any assistance with your Windows Migration or Office 2019 upgrade Krome’s Microsoft Consultancy specialists can advise, design, migrate and implement all of the latest Microsoft solutions.
Krome provide a full end-to-end Migration Consultancy service helping you to identify the desired deliverable result, assisting you, either in full, or in an advisory capacity, to plan a safe and logical migration path that will ensure your migration project is delivered successfully.
