Microsoft to roll out Office 2016 on September 22

Microsoft has officially announced the official release date of its Office 2016 for Windows in a blog post.

Julia White, general manager of Office 365 Technical Product Management, wrote, “You may have heard the rumors, but today I’m happy to confirm that Office 2016 will be broadly available starting on September 22nd.”

The post further said that current Office 365 ProPlus users will continue to receive monthly feature and security updates. Calling this up-to-date approach as “Current Branch”, it said that moving forward, users will always have the most current Office apps and capabilities deployed. The next Current Branch will release on September 22nd and will include all of the new Office 2016 app updates.

A new “Current Branch for Business update” option is also being added, which will deliver three cumulative feature updates per year, while continuing to offer monthly security updates. The first Current Branch for Business build will be released next February, with basically the same feature set as the Sept. 22 release but with adding four additional months of security updates. 

Addressing a number of the other top IT requests in Office 365 ProPlus, deployment support for Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) has been incorporated to help control network traffic when deploying updates.

Moreover, support has been added for Data Loss Prevention across the Office 2016 apps, Multi-factor Authentication and other mission critical control capabilities.