Office 2016 Set for a September 22 Launch

According to leaked Microsoft documents, the software giant will launch the Office 2016 suite for Windows—including new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Skype for Business, Visio, Access and Publisher—on September 22. And then it will follow that up with new releases of Office 365 with Skype for Business and on-premises versions of the Office servers.

The leaked documents—which may or may not be up-to-date, I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of the release plans—come courtesy of WinFuture, which notes that the release of Office 2016 for Windows is “imminent.”

“Microsoft has informed its employees in the last few days internally about when the official launch of Office 2016 is to take place,” the WinFuture report notes (in translated form), citing a source close to Microsoft, and bolstered by the following slide.

As noted in the slide, Office 2016 for Windows will launch September 22, 2015. And that release will be followed by the new Office 365 E5 subscription with Skype for Business in fiscal Q2, meaning calendar Q4, or sometime in the October to December timeframe. The on-premises Office servers “will follow,” the slide explains, meaning late 2015 or early 2016.

Microsoft launched Office 2016 for Mac back in early July, bringing a bit of parity to the subset of Office applications the firm offers on that platform. And of course it launched Office Mobile for Windows 10—touch-first versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote—around the same time. So Office 2016 for Windows is basically the last major release for this new wave of Office client products.