In accordance with Microsoft’s product lifecycle, both Office 2013 and Server 2012 officially go “end of life” with Microsoft in 2023.
Businesses using these applications or operating systems should plan to upgrade or replace them with supported, up-to-date versions.
This blog is designed to help businesses plan the best way to stay safe and secure, stay in support with Microsoft, and therefore remain CyberEssentials compliant…
Office 2013
Office 2013 was launched in January 2013 and introduced a number of new features not seen in previous Office versions. Office 2013 introduced Microsoft’s Click-To-Run 2.0 technologies to the application and was more cloud-based than its predecessors. It supported Open Document Format and Office Open XML and gave users the opportunity to save documents directly to OneDrive. While not revolutionary in its product offering the refreshed user interface was well received.
From October 2020 Microsoft confirmed that Office 2013 was no longer supported for connecting to Microsoft 365 services, including its Exchange online (email) service. While not actively blocking access to Office 365 users were warned they may encounter performance or reliability issues.
The product going end of life should be the final push to upgrade this product if you haven’t already.
While retail copies of Microsoft Office can still be purchased more and more businesses are choosing to purchase Microsoft Office through their Office 365 subscription. The added advantage being that the subscription always allows for the latest version of Office to be installed, as opposed to the “finished” retail version which does not benefit from product enhancements - how did I ever manage without xlookup in Excel – which was released as an update to the subscription version of Office 365?
Office 2013 goes end of life on April 11th 2023
Pro-Networks can help your business licence your Microsoft Office product through Office 365.
Server 2012
Server 2012 was released in October 2012 and was Microsoft’s fifth version of their Windows Server operating system. Based on Windows 8, Server 2012 only ran on 64-bit x64 processors and was also the first version of Windows Server to not offer a “Small Business Server” option, which included Exchange, Microsoft’s email server.
Server 2012 goes end of life on October 10th 2023
If your business is running Server 2012 (or older versions) you really should start planning to replace or upgrade these servers over the coming 12 months. Running unsupported software not only increases your risks from new viruses and security threats, but industry-standard certifications, such as Cyber Essentials also insist supported software is in use throughout the business.
Pro-Networks are helping customers affected by these products going end of life and if your business needs help with this, or anything IT related, please do not hesitate to contact us either on 01244 526000 or using the contact form here.