Along with the announcement of servicing extensions for Windows 10 and changes to the Office 365 ProPlus system requirements, Microsoft today confirmed that the next major update of Office desktop will be released later this year. Last year at Ignite, Microsoft announced that Office 2019 will be released in 2018. Today, they provided more details on the release schedule. Office 2019 will ship in H2 of 2018 and the preview version of the new apps and servers will start shipping in the second quarter of 2018. Another major news is that Office 2019 will run only on Windows 10. It will be supported on:

Any supported Windows 10 SAC release

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018

The next LTSC release of Windows Server

Also, Microsoft will not offer MSI as a deployment methodology for Office 2019, instead the Office 2019 client apps will be released with Click-to-Run installation technology. But Microsoft will continue to provide MSI for Office Server products.

Until now, the perpetual versions of Office were released under the Microsoft’s Fixed Lifecycle Policy, with a term of 5 years of standard support and 5 years of extended support. With Office 2019 release, Microsoft is reducing the support period. Office 2019 will ship under following extended support period:

Office 2019 will provide 5 years of mainstream support and approximately 2 years of extended support. This is an exception to our Fixed Lifecycle Policy to align with the support period for Office 2016. Extended support will end 10/14/2025.

There is no change to the support term for existing versions of Office.

Source: Microsoft