Dynamics Service Pack Support Extended

Older service packs for Dynamics products will now be supported for a longer period of time, giving customers the option to put off the potential expense and disruption of transitioning to the latest service packs. In general, only supported service packs receive the latest security and other patches, and Microsoft product support will usually insist that a customer migrates to a supported service pack before providing assistance.

Microsoft’s Dynamics line consists of four enterprise resource planning (ERP) products—Dynamics AX, Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, and Dynamics SL—as well as a customer relationship management (CRM) product called Dynamics CRM. Under the previous service pack support policy, whenever Microsoft released a new service pack for a Dynamics product, the prior service pack would be supported for only another 12 months. Under the new policy, support for a prior service pack will continue for 24 months after a new service pack is released.

The support periods last a bit longer than the stated 12 or 24 months because Microsoft “rounds up” to the second Tuesday of the subsequent calendar quarter. For example, Dynamics GP 10 SP3 was released on Oct. 15, 2008, so support for SP2 does not terminate until approximately 26 months later, on January 11, 2011. Under the old rules, support for SP2 was to have terminated on January 12, 2010.