Microsoft is officially doing away with Office on Demand from Office 365 subscriptions starting from November 2014. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the feature, it delivers the whole bunch of Office desktop applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint online when you’re on a PC which doesn’t have said Microsoft software installed locally.
The news was announced only this month through an update on a blog post, although Redmondmag points to a Microsoft forums submission dated August 21 which had already revealed the upcoming change. The change will affect Office 365 Small Business Premium, Midsize Business, Enterprise and Office 365 ProPlus subscribers.
Microsoft’s retiring use-as-needed product is currently useful when you’re logged into a PC you don’t work on regularly and hence wish to avoid using one of your Office subscription licenses. It also comes in handy on a borrowed laptop or desktop, or when you don’t have admin rights to install the productivity suite.
With Office on Demand, you can access whatever application you need via Microsoft’s click-to-run technology, as long as you have a computer with an internet connection. Once you’re done and you log out of the On Demand site, the stuff you’ve worked on is mostly wiped clean although cache files are left behind.
The Redmond-based company apparently implies that it will offer a year’s advance notice in case of any ‘disruptive changes’ it wishes to introduce. At the same time, dropping Office on Demand without the promised warning is supposedly not going to cause enough inconvenience to classify it as ‘disruptive.’
This is because Microsoft is willing to point out three Office on Demand alternatives users can depend on to carry on as normal, or as normal as possible. It’s telling Office 365 customers who are dissed by the announcement that they could turn to Office Online which we once knew as Office Web Apps, Azure RemoteApp or shared computer activation.
Microsoft explained that it decided to drop Office on Demand because only 2 percent of Office customers were actually using it.