Office 2013 Applications and Servers Arrive

The Office 2013 suite and related Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio software became available to Microsoft Volume Licensing customers Dec. 1, 2012. These products will become generally available in the first quarter of 2013, and the Microsoft-hosted Office 365 services will be upgraded to the latest products during 2013. Many organizations will evaluate the new products as replacement for soon-to-be-retired 2003 versions, but the suite and server applications may prove a worthwhile upgrade due to collaboration enhancements and usability improvements in Office 2013, and cost savings due to manageability and availability features in the server applications.

Just in Time for 2003 Version Retirements

Some organizations will evaluate the new 2013 software because they are retiring 2003 or 2007 versions of the corresponding products. Office 2003 and related products leave the Extended support phase in Apr. 2014, after which product support will require a custom support contract, and Microsoft has not said it will offer such contracts. Similarly, the 2007 versions of Office entered Extended support in Oct. 2012, so most support for those versions now requires Premier support or a similar paid support contract. Neither 2003 nor 2007 versions are likely to receive significant updates, and new Microsoft products and services are unlikely to be tested against them for compatibility with them or supported working with them in production. In contrast, the new 2013 products are supported on the latest Microsoft platform; for example, the client applications are supported on Windows 8, and the servers on Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012. (See the chart “Application Version Support on Recent Platforms“.)