Microsoft has changed the scheme of things via which it delivers security and non-security Office updates every month. The company’s Office Sustained Engineering Team announced that all important update schedule change will now be rolled out simultaneously with all future non-security related Microsoft Office product updates.
Non-Security Office Updates Schedule changed
If you remember, till recently, Microsoft delivered all the updates to Office on the same Tuesday, alongside the releases to its other products. A new Patch Tuesday is now being added for delivering non-security updates.
We want to let you know about an important change coming to the release schedule for Office updates so that you can plan accordingly. Until now, both security and non-security updates have been released on the second Tuesday of each month. Starting in April, the non-security updates will be released in Microsoft Update and the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) on the first Tuesday of the month, which is April 5 in this case. This will include all updates that have the Critical or Definition classification. Updates with the Security classification will continue to release on second Tuesday as usual.
The above description essentially means that every Tuesday will bring some updates. More likely are the bug fixes in the first week of every month. The second Tuesday will get security updates under the Patch Tuesday routine. This change applies only to the MSI version of Office. Office Click-To-Run (C2R) will release on second Tuesday.
A word of caution – since there’s just a gap of one week between the security and the standard releases, some admins might prefer to wait for some time and install all updates in one go. Not advisable! Why? These updates bring along with it many feature enhancements and bug fixes that are usually more important for Office customers, so delaying deployment won’t prove to be an affirmative solution.
