14 DAY TRIAL // Roughly 26 months from now, Microsoft will be ending the support life of Windows XP. On April 8th, 2014, the Redmond-based company will put an end to the support it offers for Windows XP, currently the most used operating system in the world.
Windows XP comes to the end of its support cycle, as per Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle policy that was introduced back in 2002.
The policy states that “Microsoft Business and Developer products, including Windows and Office products, receive a minimum of 10 years of support (5 years Mainstream Support and 5 years Extended Support), at the supported service pack level.”
Along with Windows XP, which is already ten years old and the most used platform in the world, the company will also stop offering support for Office 2003.
Thus, Microsoft recommends companies that are still using the platform to start planning the migration to a newer, modern operating system. Companies that haven’t started this planning are already late, though not too late.
“Based on historical customer deployment data, the average enterprise deployment can take 18 to 32 months from business case through full deployment,” Microsoft notes.
“To ensure you remain on supported versions of Windows and Office, you should begin your planning and application testing immediately to ensure you deploy before end of support,” the company continues.
The software giant has already delivered a series of tools meant to provide companies with what they need in order to start migrating to a new platform.
One of them is the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), available for download from Softpedia as well, via this link. It can migrate your data in place during the deployment, does not need disc imaging, and is offered for free.
However, this is only one of the tools that Microsoft came up with for its customers. Have a look at this post on the Windows Team blog to find more of them. Moreover, Companies can also have a look at the Windows XP and Office 2003 End of Support website to learn more on what they can do to kick off the transition to a new platform.