End of support for Office XP

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Per our earlier post, this is a reminder that on July 12, Office XP will exit the Extended Support phase of its lifecycle, per the Support Policy of Microsoft.

After the end of support, Microsoft will no longer provide public fixes for the Office XP release. Automatic Updates that ship on “Patch Tuesday” will be discontinued for Office XP. There will be no effect on installed software; products will still continue to function., activation will continue to work as expected.

Office XP was quite a remarkable release, it was the version of Office that deprecated Clippy and brought us SharePoint, Web Services integration and other things. SharePoint Team Services turned out to be a pretty smart bet, growing to a $1.3B business over the next 10 years, adding over 20,000 users each day. Office XP brought us Activation, Task Panes, Speech Recognition, Word’s “Reveal Formatting” command, the Data Connection Wizard of Excel, Rules in Outlook, and even the Path animation type in PowerPoint. As with all releases of Office, XP introduced quite a bit of new capability. The original Office XP Press Release is still available, dated March 5, 2001.

What options do Office XP users have?

Microsoft recommends that customers keep their systems secure by upgrading to the latest, supported product and/or service pack, such as Microsoft Office 2010. Office 2007 Service Pack 2 and Office 2003 Service Pack 3 are also supported for the duration outlined in the Support Lifecycle Product Database.

For our Premier Support customers, a Custom Support program is available. The support team has posted a useful web page about available options for retired product support. They have also published a good FAQ page to explain some of the background on the support policy.

For more information, consult these resources:

· Retired Product Support Options
· Microsoft Services Premier Support
· Microsoft Services Premier Support – Custom Support
· Support Lifecycle Information for all Office Products
· Office XP Support Lifecycle
· Microsoft Support Lifecycle