The last day of extended support for Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 was October 10, 2017. It’s been a great 10-year run, but Office 2007 has reached its end of life. It’s time to move on. Sigh…
Yes, Office 2007 and Outlook 2007 will still function, but the software isn’t supported by Microsoft any longer. It isn’t receiving any new features, security patches or bug fixes. Online documentation and technical notes about these products aren’t being updated. Even enterprise customers have been cut off as Microsoft is no longer offering extended support through customer support contracts.
If you’re using both Outlook 2007 and Office 365, you can’t access Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes through the Office 365 portal. That’s because the RPC over HTTP protocol, also known as Outlook Anywhere, has been replaced with the MAPI over HTTP protocol, which supports multifactor authentication. Outlook 2007 doesn’t support this protocol.
Despite repeated notifications and warnings from Microsoft and industry experts, a large number of organizations are still using Office 2007. According to a report released by Spiceworks in early November, 68 percent of surveyed organizations are using Office 2007. Just 53 percent are using Office 365, Microsoft’s subscription-based offering that’s automatically updated so you’re always using the latest version. Believe it or not, 3 percent of surveyed organizations are still using Office 97.
Continuing to use Office 2007, Outlook 2007 or any other end-of-life software or operating system is risky business. The most obvious danger is that unsupported software is a security landmine that could explode at any time. Your firewall and antivirus protection won’t stop hackers from exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities and using them to access other parts of your network. Also, ancient software might not meet minimum regulatory compliance standards and could earn you heavy fines, lawsuits and other headaches.
Planning to use new business applications? Don’t expect them to work with end-of-life software. Even if your new applications function, reliability and performance will probably suffer. That means productivity suffers. Customer service suffers. Employee morale suffers.
Maintaining old software also brings added expenses. Suppose a mission-critical application fails and you’re only option is to get Microsoft to help you fix it. The cost of the fix could end up being much more than the expense of a software upgrade. The cost of downtime will be even higher.
If you’re using end-of-life software, it’s time to take action. Identify every instance of end-of-life software in your environment. Calculate the cost to upgrade, including the cost of software licensing, training and any compatibility issues that must be addressed. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis, which will likely tell you that the benefits of an upgrade far outweigh the costs. Create an upgrade plan to ensure a seamless, cost-effective transition to the new software, or partner with a consultant to manage the process for you.
Without the right tools, it can be difficult to maintain accurate inventories of the applications that are installed on your organization’s systems. Verteks can help you find old and unsupported software by using our software inventory and asset management solution — free for our managed services clients.
Failing to upgrade from end-of-life software due to cost and aggravation ignores far more serious risks and consequences. Let Verteks help you understand your options and develop and execute an upgrade plan that minimizes business disruption.
