Just in case you misread the title, I’m talking about Office XP here and not Windows XP; this specifically pertains to the Microsoft Office suite of software. Are you a Microsoft Office XP user? If you are, you should be concerned because Microsoft has announced that they will not update or support Office XP anymore starting this week. Office XP has been published since 10 years ago and it will be blocked by its support starting on July 12 2011.

When something goes from “mainstream support” to “extended support” at Microsoft, that essentially means Microsoft will continue to support enterprise that uses the product, or in other words biz-only support and not consumer. For each Microsoft product, most of them are supported for only 10 years since the product was released. The first five years called mainstream support, the other five years called Extended Support. Microsoft has a strong excuse to stop support and update to the previous product, it is because the users of Microsoft product decrease because some new products of Microsoft are released and has a lot of users. Microsoft has given support update security and patches for 10 years. The last update was in December 2010.

Office XP, which is the version before Office 2003, has been in extended support for the last 5 years, but as of next week will not be. That means no more support from Microsoft on that particular product even for enterprise.

It’s highly doubtful you use Office XP at home, but there may be some poor souls at there still using that decade-old version of Office at work. Sure, it gets the job done, but don’t expect any support from Microsoft on it after this week. Microsoft Office 2003 will end up on April 8, 2014, Microsoft Office 2007 on April 11, 2017 and Microsoft Office 2010 on October 13, 2020.

So if you do in fact use Office XP at home, then perhaps you should thinking about switching, by purchasing a new copy of Office 2010, or trying LibreOffice or OpenOffice for free. I posted a MS Office 2010 features and pricing matrix for your review along with some screen-shots of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Here at the office, I do not use MS Office anymore. I use a combination of Google Calendar and Gmail and LibreOffice for my work.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2011 at 18:06 by dsmith and is filed under Email, Gmail, Google, LibreOffice, Microsoft, Migration, Openoffice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.