By Paul DeGroot [bio]
Posted: May 31, 2004

• Sidebar: Summary of Major Support Life-Cycle Changes
• Illustration: The New Support Life Cycle
• Chart: Support Life-Cycle Phases

The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.

Recognizing that new product versions are taking longer to release and deploy, Microsoft has extended its support life-cycle guidelines. They ensure a minimum two-year support overlap between a product and its successor, longer support periods for major service packs, and an additional three years of fee-based software updates and other support for most business products. The changes give customers more time to evaluate and deploy updates or new releases, and may resolve some immediate life-cycle issues for major products such as SQL Server 2000 and Windows XP.

Announced in late May 2004, the most recent changes mean critical security updates and custom hotfixes, as well as Premier support and other fee-based product support options, will now be provided for at least 10 years, rather than the current seven years. Furthermore, all products will receive free support (as per warrantee) for at least two years after the successor product ships. The changes affect most current products but do not affect most older products, such as Windows 98 or Office 97, that are past or near their original support end-of-life dates. The changes do not affect the types of service that Microsoft offers through Product Support Services, but only the time during which some of those services will be available.

(For a brief review of the changes, see the sidebar "Summary of Major Support Life-Cycle Changes".)

Support Phases for Business Software

Microsoft divides its ongoing support for business software into three phases: Mainstream, Extended, and Online Self-Help. With each successive phase, new software updates become fewer and, in some cases, are no longer free. (For a summary of each phase, see the chart "Support Life-Cycle Phases".)

In the Mainstream phase, which, since Windows 2000 shipped, typically lasts for five years after the product first becomes available, Microsoft provides a full range of updates, including security updates, non-security updates, and service packs, to all customers for free. Feature packs are also available during this phase and are usually free. However, in some cases Mainstream support will be longer than five years: Microsoft now says that products will be in Mainstream support for at least two years after their successor product ships, a change that will affect major products such as SQL 2000 and Windows XP.

The Mainstream phase is followed by an Extended support phase. Under the previous support life-cycle policy, this phase lasted only two years; it has now been lengthened to five years or two years after its second successor ships, whichever is longer. (For example, Windows XP is the successor to Windows 2000 Professional, and the "Longhorn" OS will be the second successor to Windows 2000 Professional.) During the Extended phase, free security updates are available, but non-security updates are available only to customers with a paid support contract. New service packs and feature packs are no longer released.

During the old (two-year) Extended phase, the company delivered all security updates for Windows through Windows Update, a service that can automatically push updates to computers configured to receive them. However, in the final three years of the new, five-year Extended phase, Microsoft might not provide updates through Windows Update. As OSs age and become obsolete, protecting them against more modern threats becomes increasingly difficult, and the time required to test these updates becomes onerous, possibly taking resources away from more urgent projects. As a result, users may need to visit the Microsoft Download Center to locate and download security and other patches for products that shipped more than seven years earlier.

The final phase, Online Self-Help, remains essentially unchanged. During this phase, which lasts for at least one year, the product is effectively retired, but customers can continue to search Microsoft’s Web site for solutions to problems as well as download previously published service packs and other software updates that Microsoft deems relevant. As a general rule, Microsoft does not offer new software updates of any kind during this period, but it has made exceptions on a case-by-case basis—for example, to patch a vulnerability in older software that might be exploited to launch denial-of-service attacks on Web servers and thus threaten the functioning of the Internet. However, with the recent lengthening of the Extended support phase, the issuance of "out-of-cycle" security patches during the Online Self-Help phase seems less likely.

Although it clarifies many aspects of the support life cycle, Microsoft’s support schedule still contains a number of anomalies and inconsistencies. (For a full discussion of the support life cycle, see "Maintaining Software Through the Life Cycle" in the July 2004 issue of Update.)

Impact of Changes on Key Products

The new product support life cycle will have a significant impact on some major Microsoft products and on how organizations plan for and deploy their resources to test and deploy updates and new releases. Key retirement dates for some major products have been extended, and customers no longer face situations where they will have little time to evaluate and test a new product before support expires on the product they are currently using. Major products affected by the change include the following:

SQL Server 2000

Under previous guidelines, this product would be near or at the end of Mainstream support (Dec. 2005) when its successor, SQL 2005 (formerly code-named Yukon), ships in 2005. Extended support for SQL 2000 was due to end in 2007.

The new "two-year rule"—Mainstream support lasts for five years or for two years after the release of a successor product—pushes the expiration of SQL Server Mainstream support to 2007, and Extended support to 2012.

The longer life cycle will give customers ample opportunity to test SQL 2005 and determine how it fits into their computing infrastructure, and they will have much longer to migrate critical or complex systems off SQL 2000 before Extended support ends.

Windows 2000

Mainstream support for most versions of Windows 2000 expires at the end of 2005, and Extended support was to expire at the end of 2007. (Dates for Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition trail the dates of other versions by three months.) Under the new guidelines, Extended support has been moved out to 2010.

This is particularly significant because Windows 2000 is the most widely used desktop client in corporate environments, accounting for more than 50% of desktop OSs, according to AssetMetrix. Many of these customers planned to skip Windows XP and move directly to its successor, code-named Longhorn. However, with Longhorn now scheduled for 2006 and possibly slipping until 2007, these organizations faced the possibility of a gap between the expiration of Extended support on Windows 2000 and the arrival of Longhorn. Even with a slight overlap, organizations would have little time to test and roll out Longhorn—a very significant OS upgrade—to every PC in their organization.

The new guidelines give them until 2010 to evaluate Longhorn before rolling it out across their organization.

Windows XP

Even organizations that had upgraded to Windows XP faced a possible support gap: under the old rules, Mainstream support on Windows XP expires at the end of 2006. Even if Longhorn ships before then, only a tiny fraction of business customers would be able to migrate to the new OS before Mainstream support ended on Windows XP, and millions of customers who would prefer to wait until the first service pack on Longhorn was released would probably have had to stay with Windows XP for a year or more past the end of Mainstream support.

The new two-year rule erases the gap and ensures an orderly transition to the new OS. Regardless of when Longhorn actually ships, Microsoft will always have at least one older OS (Windows XP) in Mainstream support and another major OS, Windows 2000, in Extended support.

Windows NT 4.0

Key dates for Windows NT 4.0 have not changed as a result of the new policy: Mainstream support expired at the end of 2002, and Extended support is still scheduled to expire in June 2004 (for NT Workstation) and Dec. 2004 (for NT Server).

However, this OS is still widely used, and Microsoft says that customers with custom support agreements will receive free patches for any critical security vulnerabilities after the end of Extended support. Those patches may be released publicly if Microsoft sees any significant exploits of Windows NT 4.0 security vulnerabilities "in the wild."

Office 2000

Office 2000 is still scheduled to move out of the Mainstream phase in July 2004. However, its Extended support period will now run until 2009, rather than ending in 2006 as originally scheduled.

This timetable should give Office 2000 stalwarts who have passed over Office XP, and possibly Office 2003, sufficient time to migrate to a post-Longhorn version of Office.

Internet Explorer

Support deadlines for Internet Explorer (IE) are complex and depend on which version of IE is used and which OS it is running on. Furthermore, expiration of support on IE depends on when IE 6.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2) ships; support of some versions will end immediately, support for all other versions was scheduled to end within 12 months. However, no date has been announced for the release of IE SP2, and it is not clear whether Microsoft even plans to release it.

Those factors have created considerable uncertainty about a product that is widely used as the client interface to Web-based applications running on the Internet, or on internal Web servers.

Microsoft now says that IE 6.0 SP1 will be supported for 24 months after IE 6.0 SP2 ships, as long as it is used on an OS that is still supported.

Products Not Affected

The new guidelines will not affect most earlier Microsoft products, those that are past or near the expiration dates for support. Among those not affected are the following:

Windows 98, 98SE, and Millennium Edition will follow previously published guidelines. Extended support for these products ended in 2003, but Microsoft will continue to release critical security updates for these widely used products through June 30, 2006.

Windows Media Player versions will follow the life cycle of the OS they shipped with, unless they were shipped separately, "out of band." Those versions will follow already published support dates.

Exchange 5.5 is already in Extended support and expiration of that support, in Dec. 2005, will not be changed.

SQL 6.5 support has ended.

Resources

The Directions on Microsoft "Enterprise Software Roadmap" provides a comprehensive review of current Microsoft enterprise software, likely dates and feature sets for future versions, and major support dates. At the time this article was published, the latest version of the Roadmap report was released in June 2004.

Detailed information regarding the updated support policy can be found at the Microsoft support life-cycle policy Web site, www.microsoft.com/lifecycle/.

The security patch rating system is described at www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/rating.mspx.