Microsoft Advising Companies to Move to Office 2010

Those of you still running Office 2003, either individually or at your company, are being urged by Microsoft (News - Alert) to migrate to the latest version of the popular Office suite.

In an official Office blog published earlier this week, Chris Barry, Microsoft’s Director of Office Enterprise pointed out that Office 2003 is now eight years old and feeling its age. A lot of technical changes have happened since 2003. And just as people are using the latest smartphones and other devices to get their work done, they should be using the latest productivity tools, such as Office 2010, in Microsoft’s opinion.

As further incentive, Barry also noted that Microsoft will cut off its current level of extended support for Office 2003 in April of 2014. That means the company will no longer offer security updates and other patches for the software, leaving it vulnerable to malware and other threats. And you can be sure that once April 2014 comes around, hackers and other cybercriminals will specifically try to target Office 2003 knowing that they’ll hit a lot of unpatched versions.

Of course, 2014 sounds like a long ways off. But all IT pros know that any major migration can chew up a fair amount of time. You have to plan and map out the migration, perform compatibility testing, establish user training, and then roll out the actual software. I was part of a team that worked on an Office migration at my former company and recall that it took the better part of a year from start to finish. So even a migration project that kicks off right now may not be completed until the end of 2012.

Since Microsoft is also ending support for Windows XP in April 2014, the company is recommending that businesses still stuck on both XP and Office 2003 plan a joint migration to move to Windows 7 and Office 2010. In that event, such a migration could easily take longer than a year, moving us into 2013.

Of course, any major migration is costly in terms of money and manpower, two items that may be in short supply these days. But we all know that the upgrade cycle, for better or worse, requires that we periodically refresh the operating systems and applications that users rely on to accomplish their work. And for those of you still running software eight to ten years old, you’ll eventually need to move up to the current versions to ensure that your users have the latest tools for their job and that those tools are fully supported by Microsoft.

On a final note, any of you still on Office 2007 should know that Microsoft will release its third and likely final service pack for the four-year old Office suite. As described in a blog post last week, Office 2007 SP3 will initially be offered as a manual update through the Microsoft Download Center and as an optional update through Microsoft Update before becoming an automatic update. IT pros who support Office 2007 will of course want to download and test the third service pack before deploying it throughout their organizations.