⚠️ End of Microsoft Office Support on AWS for Automated Rendering – Are You Ready?

Starting October 1, 2025, Microsoft will change its Office licensing terms, effectively prohibiting the use of Microsoft Office on third-party cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Alibaba for automated scenarios — including document rendering workflows such as those powered by ARender.


What’s changing?

Microsoft has announced that it will no longer allow:

• SPLA (Service Provider License Agreement) licenses, and
• Unattended Office licenses (used for automation without a user), 

on shared infrastructure hosted by "Listed Providers" such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

👉 Official source: Microsoft Partner Blog – New licensing benefits (Oct 2023)

Who is impacted?

You may be impacted if:

• You are running ARender in the cloud, with a Windows Server hosting Microsoft Office, and
• Your Microsoft Office license was acquired via SPLA or volume licensing, deployed on AWS or Google Cloud.

These setups will become non-compliant as of October 1, 2025, even if they continue to function technically.

What are the alternatives?

1. Review your infrastructure and Microsoft licenses

• On-premise or private cloud: You can continue using Office if hosted on dedicated infrastructure with appropriate licenses.
• Microsoft Azure: Some Office use cases remain allowed on Azure (e.g., via Azure Virtual Desktop), provided licensing terms are respected.

⇒ It is a complex topic, and we only share our understanding here, we recommend you to engage with your Microsoft licensing expert  / point of contact in order to make sure you will be legally using their services after the October 1st, 2025.

2. Use ARender’s built-in alternatives to MS Office

For several years, ARender has supported robust alternatives for Office document rendering:

• LibreOffice (headless): A reliable, open-source rendering engine for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
• DirectOffice: A lightweight, more loyal to original format, fast rendering engine optimized for web environments, available for a premium

These options are fully integrated into ARender and allow for Office document rendering without relying on Microsoft Office — keeping you compliant with the new licensing model.

Our recommendation

We strongly recommend all customers:

• Assess their current deployment, and
• Review their Microsoft licensing agreements, especially if their setup runs on AWS or other third-party public clouds.

A Unified and Secure View for Office Documents

ARender natively supports a wide range of Microsoft Office formats: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, Project, Publisher, as well as their OpenDocument equivalents.
All files are displayed in a unified interface, with no need to download or open them in separate tools — rendered securely as image + text.
This eliminates document duplication, reduces security risks, and simplifies client-side maintenance — especially critical for large-scale deployments.

👉 You can find the full list of supported formats in our documentation:
https://docs.arender.io/what-is-arender/file-format-support/

📬 Interested in learning more or evaluating ARender for your organization? Get in touch with us here.