Support for these Microsoft enterprise products will end in 2023

Microsoft policy limits application support to ten years for most products, with no defined lifecycle. As a result, long list of obsolete or obsolete products in 2023.

The full list is documented as part of Microsoft’s lifecycle website, which shows what will be out of support or extended support through 2027, along with the tools to find each product. It’s important to stay up-to-date on this, especially if you’re supporting business software.

Support for Microsoft products will end in 2023

2013 was a big year for Microsoft. It launched many products, many of which were offered under perpetual licenses with no subscription or cloud requirements. As a result, these products have remained key elements of many corporate identities and have been installed on generations of desktops and laptops. These images have been tested and debugged, work on different versions of Windows, and changes require a lot more testing.

Operating System

At one end of the scale, this list includes operating systems like Windows 8.1 and Windows RT, as well as Windows 7 if you’ve paid for extended security updates. Support for these was dropped in January, along with other OS releases such as Windows Embedded 8 and Windows Server 2012 the support ends in July and October.

SEE: Switch to Windows 11.

Servers

In addition to desktop applications, key pieces of infrastructure will also lose support this year, as Exchange Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 will no longer receive updates after April 2013. You will not receive bug fixes, security patches, or technical support. One minor change that could have a big impact as governments around the world consider the role of daylight savings time is that you won’t get time zone updates.

As Jeff Woolsey, principal program manager for Windows Server, he noted on Twitter“This is not a practice. You should cancel these products. Please do not take the risk of running in an unsupported scenario.”

Microsoft Support Tools

But the list doesn’t just include operating systems, servers, and desktop applications; other tools appear to support users.

In 2023, this list will include tools such as Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) version 8.0 and Microsoft Office Audit and Control Management Server 2013. If you are not sure if you are using a supported version of tools such as these, not only will you not be able to provide full support to your users, but you may not be compliant with licenses and unable to ensure proper auditing.

Subscription services

There are also issues with ongoing subscription services; For example, if you’re using Windows 8.1 with any version of Microsoft 365, it’s no longer supported. This is more of an alignment with OS support than a cloud service issue, but something to watch out for as versions of Windows 10 are deprecated.

SEE: Get Microsoft Office Pro Plus and become an Excel expert with TechRepublic Academy.

Subscription services like Microsoft 365, even within apps like Excel, aren’t as monolithic as you might expect. While its additional data types have proven useful, they often depend on third-party providers. If you’ve been using Wolfram data types in your Excel applications, they won’t work in June 2023. They are joined at the same time by Excel’s basic accounting money template, which no longer brings new transactions.

Office 2013 is end of life

Naturally, the largest is Office 2013. While support for the use of cloud services ended in 2020, it remains a popular tool thanks to the fact that it can be used with a perpetual license. If you’re still using it, you’ll need to migrate your users to a newer version to reduce the risk to your business because it’s no longer receiving security updates.

SEE: Get Microsoft Office Pro for Windows 2021 with this deal from TechRepublic Academy.

However, it’s worth thinking about the future of installing Office 2019, because while it’s still in its full support lifecycle, it’s likely to lose access to cloud services in 2023 as it falls out of mainstream support. Although services may continue to function, it is not guaranteed and Microsoft does not undertake to correct connectivity problems.

Handling End of Support

There are many options for how to handle these end products. One is to upgrade to the latest on-premises version, perhaps switch to a subscription edition with SharePoint, or move to Microsoft 365, using migration tools to move data from on-premises to the cloud.

While the latter option would shift the support burden to Microsoft, it may not be suitable for all organizations, especially those with regulations that require content to remain on-premises. It’s worth checking out Microsoft’s instructions to shut down the servers and all related best practices.

If you are switching from Exchange 2013 to Microsoft 365, the best solution is a full transition migration, as there is no option to group mailboxes with a batch. Alternatively, you can set up a hybrid environment and slowly transition users to cloud-based mail.

SEE: Check out our list of top data migration tools that can help you with the task.

If you are moving to Exchange 2019 on-premises, you must follow Microsoft’s guidelines as the process requires you to upgrade your Active Directory environment before moving mailboxes to the new server. Local update is not recommended.

Some organizations may use multiple versions of Exchange where they depend on certain third-party applications. Here you should test newer versions of the software with newer server releases, such as Exchange 2016 or 2019.

After you’ve successfully upgraded your code, migrate a small group of users to the newer infrastructure to ensure they can use the new tools and services before moving all remaining mailboxes and decommissioning the old servers.

As part of the migration, use logging tools to ensure that clients connect to new servers before the migration is complete. Microsoft has made one of its internal support tools available to any Exchange administrator through its Techcommunity blog platform. Log Parser Studio it can handle large Exchange log files, and its polling tools quickly discover clients that need to be reconfigured or upgraded to work with newer Exchange servers.

While the lifecycle of Microsoft products is relatively predictable, it’s important to ensure that you don’t just get support, but exactly when. Knowing whether or not something will be supported for a few more months can help you complete your migration or upgrade and ensure you’re ready with the right new licenses to meet your business requirements.