Office 2003 End of Life
The April 2014 deadline
Microsoft has announced that they are ending support of Office 2003 and Windows XP on April 8th, 2014. What does this mean? As they describe, “After April 8, 2014, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates.” This, according to Microsoft, exposes Office 2003 users to greater “Security & Compliance Risks”.
Exploring the alternatives
Some companies and users will write a big check to Microsoft and upgrade to a new version of Windows and a new version of Office. But other companies will see this as an opportunity to explore the alternatives, including open source products like Apache OpenOffice, the leading free productivity suite. It is not too early to start planning for a migration off of Microsoft Office 2003 and Windows XP. Many companies have already started.
