Microsoft has announced a continuous updates expansion at Ignite
Windows 10 was always going to be continually updated rather than new versions introduced.
This year Windows Server 2016 joined the party when it was announced that there would be twice yearly updates – Windows 10 moved to the same cadence.
At Ignite Microsoft announce that a number of other products would join the continuous update party including:
Office 2019 – should see it in second half of 2018
Exchange
SharePoint
Skype for Business
Assuming they join the twice yearly updates – NOTE these are not patches but new features or changes – cadence that the OS teams have adopted this is going to bring interesting times for operations staff.
On the plus side the need to roll out completely new builds of workstations goes away because you’re not going to get a new OS in a few years.
On the negative side you’re going to have to develop a strategy for dealing with new feature releases on a perhaps twice yearly basis, You can put off, for a time, these particular updates but life will start to get very messy very quickly unless you freeze all feature updates. – Bet your users will be clamouring for the updated features.
This change is 1-2 years off but you need to start thinking about how you’re going to handle it NOW otherwise you’ll have a very complicated environment that becomes more difficult to manage with time.
Good luck