Business Applications and Services

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

The current versions (branded 2013) of the Office suite, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Lync Server, and related products were made available to volume licensing customers on Dec. 2012. The wave also included a major update to the Microsoft-hosted Office 365 services, which have continued to receive new features since the update. Most 2013 wave applications are supported on Windows Server 2012 R2 but require SP1 updates that were released in Feb. 2014. (See the illustration “Application Versions Supported on Recent Platforms“.) New versions are likely in the first half of 2015, but much of Microsoft’s development effort will be focused on the Office 365 line of hosted services.

Office 2003 and related products left Extended support Apr. 8, 2014. Bug fixes and other support for the 2003 versions of the products now require custom support contracts.

Office Suite

The Office suite, Microsoft’s most widely used client application for business, enables document editing, data access and manipulation, e-mail, presentations, and collaboration. Office suites include combinations of the following applications:

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