Microsoft won’t provide extended support for Office 2007 products beyond October 2017 deadline

Important information for anyone involved in their companies IT infrastructure:- Microsoft’s Office 2007/Exchange 2007 wave of client and server software is set to exit support in October 2017, and extended custom support agreements are going away.

Microsoft Office 2007 products will be reaching their end of support dates next year 2017.

In Microsoft’s world of software, mainstream support is usually around a five year time period where they provide free patches and fixes, this includes but not limited to security updates for its products. When a Microsoft product comes to the end of their mainstream support period, Microsoft carries on providing extended support for a period of time after it finishes, this means that users have been getting free security fixes but other types of updates are paid and do need specific licensing deals.

“End of support” means there will be no more fixes or patches — paid or free, security or non-security — coming for specific products. Up until now, Microsoft has allowed Premier support customers to get around this by paying for pricey custom support contracts, provided that they could show they had a specific plan to migrate to a newer version of a product.

“The Office 2007 wave of products will be reaching end of support over the next 12 months, as per Microsoft Lifecycle Policy. After those end of support dates, we will no longer offer custom support on any version of Office products (Exchange Server; Office Suites; SharePoint Server; Office Communications Server; Lync Server; Skype for Business Server; Project Server and Visio).

“In the past we have offered custom support for a subset of Office products to customers with Premier support contracts. We have seen demand for custom support decline as more customers move to Office 365. Note that this change applies only to custom support, but does not impact any of the standard support offerings.

“As always, customers should consult with their account manager regarding their individual migration plans, and may consider services such as Software Assurance Deployment & Planning Services for on-premises upgrades, and Microsoft FastTrack for cloud migrations.

Extended, free support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 with Service Pack 3 is set to end in April 2017. Support for Office 2007 with Service Pack 3 is slated to end next October.