Microsoft Office 365 Will Receive Quarterly Updates

by Mike on March 3, 2013

Microsoft’s Office President Kurt Delbene has gone on the record to say that Office 365 will be receiving updates on a quarterly basis and that the mechanisms to achieve this change cycle are in place. The purpose of having such a fast change cycle was to have to have a product that could respond quickly to customer requests for changes.

While Delbene was quick to offer comments in regards to Office 365, the same could not be said about Office 2013 and at this time, this Microsoft product may or may not receive such timely updates. Delbene described the change cycle as a pattern of “major-minor cadence”, meaning that some updates would be considered minor changes and that these would have shorter cycles. There will also be major changes which will impact the infrastructure of the service and naturally, these will be pushed out over a longer cycle.

According to Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, the Office 365 updates could also be targeted to just one application at a time. For instance, the first update may update Microsoft Excel while the next update could be for Word. This shifting between products would continue until Microsoft has updated all of their applications within the Office suite of products.

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