Office 2019 - Okay so - why ?

At the MS Ignite conference this week MS announced the availability of Office 2019 scheduled for release late in 2018.

 This perpetual release vs the click-to-run model of Office365 is the traditional Office that users have been purchasing and deploying for the last 20 years.  

 Along with Office 2019 there will be updates to the associated back end services - So Exchange, SharePoint and Skype For Business (now being transitioned to MS Teams).

 A couple of years ago I made the statement - "Will there be an Exchange 2019 - Absolutely - will you actually deploy it - probably not".  

 In the early days of Office365 - there were many restrictions around things like SharePoint apps or certain Exchange Mailboxes or 3rd party integrations that either required an on-prem install or potentially some sort of hybrid install.  There were also some very visible outages that had many questioning moving something like Exchange to the cloud.  

 But those restrictions are becoming less and less.  I recently saw an article discussing the potential of removing one of the cornerstones of the MS Server infrastructure - Active Directory and moving it to Azure AD in the cloud versus on-prem.  

 Services like AD and Exchange along with Office are the baseline that many corporations used for their day-to-day operations.  

 But the reality is that Office365 is really rock solid and with the higher mobility of users and multi-platform (i.e. Mobile) - the use case for keeping these services on prem is really going away.  

 The combination of Azure AD, Office365 Self service installation and update of Office apps and cloud based Exchange is a pretty powerful combination and companies have been moving there in droves over the last 5 years.  

 Personally I see no value in maintaining these services on prem anymore and so while it doesn't surprise me that MS made the announcement regarding the availability of these services to address the legacy environments out there - it comes back to is it worth the cost and effort to install and migrate to yet another version of Office/Exchange, etc when it can all be handled for you in the cloud.  

 There used to be a time when services like AD and Exchange were somewhat rocket science to IT organizations.   Today they are a commodity and moving them to a cloud consumption model make perfect sense.   There are more important apps that should be the attention of IT - not Office and Exchange.  

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