With the new Windows as a Service model for Windows 10, Microsoft has been really successful in delivering their latest offerings for Windows 10 to the users. Many of their customers in the Education as well as the Enterprise sector have adapted this update cycle of them and are always running with all the latest updates and patches. But still, there are some parts of these Enterprise and Education customers who are not able to follow this update cycle. This is due to many reasons. Some regions even do not have a proper connectivity option, some have their software compatibility issues and others.
Windows 10 Education and Enterprise Support extended
Now based on the feedback from these customers, Microsoft has announced that they will be extending their support lifecycle for Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education editions only to 30 months.
This change is in effect for the versions of Windows that are currently officially supported by Microsoft. This includes versions 1607, 1703, 1709 and 1803. And will also include all the future releases of Windows 10 unless another counter announcement is made by Microsoft themselves. This will help the customers with a longer development cycle, to keep up with the pace of Microsoft to release updates and plan, test and deploy their solutions on these new updates.
Microsoft also mentioned the following things in their announcement,
- All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of March (starting with 1903) will continue to be supported for 18 months from their release date. This maintains the semi-annual update cadence as our north star and retains the option for customers that want to update twice a year.
- All feature releases of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, and Office 365 ProPlus will continue to be supported for 18 months (this applies to feature updates targeting both March and September).
This will eventually make a better impression and bond between Microsoft and its customers in the Education and the Enterprise sectors.
You can read more about this announcement here.