Change is difficult. Few will dispute that. However, when a company announces that it will stop supporting a particular product, it’s important to take note. In this case, Microsoft has announced it will no longer support the Microsoft Office 2007 products beyond October 2017. Those of you thinking it’s not a big deal, because you can get extended custom support for an additional five years, will be wrong. The company has also stated it will no longer engage in those types of deals either.
This means that anyone still using any of those products at home or at the office (Exchange Server, Office Suite, SharePoint Server, Lync Server, Skype for Business Server, Visio, Project Server, and Office Communications Server) will need to put an upgrade plan into place prior to the end of life date next year.
Why is this important? It is because once a product has had an end of support date set, no patches, security or otherwise, will be released after that date. So if any new exploitable vulnerabilities are found, there is no way to fix it and those holes will remain open for the enterprising hacker to find and wreak havoc.
Some of the product support will end in April 2017 (Microsoft Exchange 2007, SP3) and others (Office 2007 SP3) in October. There are some rumors that customer support may be available for some premier customers for a very limited time, but it is just that; a rumor.
In the meantime, check with your Microsoft representatives to see when support for your products does expire and get to work on getting them upgraded before that date.
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