14/01/2014
Windows XP, Office 2003, Small Business Server 2003 end of life on April 8, 2014.
From Microsoft`s point of view , “end of life” means no longer offer much in the way of support for the operating system. No security updates, no technical support, nothing. Things like drivers and software will also soon be hard, if not impossible to find.
To be fair, that’s in keeping with Microsoft’s product support policy that’s been the way since 2002. Since then, Microsoft has agreed to offer at least 10 years of product support.
If you store any kind of personal information or do online banking the lack of security updates alone should be sending up a big, red flag. For some machines running Windows XP, simply upgrading the operating system won’t cut it. Some Windows XP-generation machines won’t be powerful enough to run Windows 7 or 8 nearly as smoothly as you’ll want. And let’s not even talk about Windows Vista (we’ll pretend Microsoft didn’t make that mistake).
I am offering a free, no obligation upgrade check for all windows XP PC`s from now until April so, If you are thinking of upgrading your PC or laptop drop me an email and let’s see if your computer can run windows 8.
If you are a small business and still using windows small business server 2003, then it really is time to start looking at your migration plan, it’s unlikely that the hardware that is currently running SBS 2003 will be up to the job of running a more modern version of server.
SBS 2003 being used in a production environment after it has reached `end of life` really will soon have an effect on your business, and in the case of the exchange server component of SBS 2003, could affect your customers with things like spam.
