The Office System

Microsoft Prepares to Kill Office 2003 SP2

Upgrade to Service Pack 3 as soon as possible

By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

24th of September 2008, 11:46 GMT

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Time is running out for Office 2003 Service Pack 2. Microsoft is gearing up to pull the plug on the precursor of Office 2003 SP3. As of the coming month, the Redmond company will no longer deliver support for Service Pack 2 for Office 2003. Even though the Microsoft Support Lifecycle can span to as much as two years, the software company is killing support for Office 2003 SP2 just one year after having launched the latest service pack.

“Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) was released nearly a year ago, on September 17th, 2007. Per the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy for service packs, when a new Office service pack is released, the previous service pack is supported for one year. This provides customers an opportunity to test and deploy the new service pack. In accordance with Microsoft’s lifecycle policy, Office 2003 Service Pack 2 will leave support on September 17th, 2008,” revealed a member of the Office Sustained Engineering team.

Office 2003 SP2 users that have failed so far to upgrade to Service Pack 3 have until mid-October 2008 to do so. Come December 2008, Microsoft will no longer offer support for Office 2003 Service Pack 2. Having launched SP3 in September 2007, Microsoft only debuted the automatic distribution of the service pack at the end of February 2008. The end of 2007 was also synonymous with the availability of the first service pack for the Office 2007 System.

“This date is extended for security updates to include the second Tuesday of the following month. Any security updates released on or before the second Tuesday in October, October 14th, will support both Service Packs 2 and 3. Security updates released after October 14th will support only Service Pack 3. We encourage all customers to deploy Service Pack 3 as soon as possible to take advantage of the significant security benefits that it contains,” the Office Sustained Engineering team member added.

Office 2003 SP3 is available for download here.

TAGS:

Office 2003 | SP2 | SP3 | Office 2007 | SP1

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