Microsoft Office 2010 Approaches End of Life

Support for Microsoft Office 2010 is scheduled to end on October 13th, 2020, with no extension or extended security updates from Microsoft.

If your organisation is among the companies still using Microsoft Office 2010 programs, it’s time to start planning your next Microsoft Office upgrade before October in order to avoid security risks.

The good news is that there are ways to upgrade to the latest version – Either via a subscriptions to Microsoft 365, or Microsoft Office 2019.

Also worth noting – Support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020. Even though Microsoft Office 2010 will be supported until October 13, 2020, Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft since January 2020. If you’re still using Windows 7, we highly recommend that you upgrade your operating system as soon as possible!

What does End of Life mean?
Microsoft has a support lifecycle for all of its programs, during which they provide fixes to known issues, bugs and security patches. This lifecycle typically lasts 10 years and starts from the date of the product’s initial release.

When a program reaches the end of its support lifecycle, Microsoft will no longer provide:
• Bug fixes for issues that are discovered
• Security fixes for vulnerabilities that are discovered
• Phone or chat technical support for issues (and existing support content will be retired)
• The ability to download End of Life products from Microsoft

What happens after October 13th, 2020?
While your Microsoft Office 2010 programs will continue to function, you will be exposing yourself and your organisation to serious and potentially harmful security risks by using an unsupported program.  Because Microsoft Office 2010 will no longer receive security updates after October 2020, we strongly recommend that you upgrade before the end of life deadline.

Microsoft warn that if you use Outlook 2010 to access Office 365 based email services these may not work after the 13th October.

What are my options?

The best way to protect yourself and your organisation is to upgrade to a newer version of Office:
• On-premise upgrade: Microsoft Office 2019
• Cloud upgrade: Subscription to Microsoft 365

Microsoft Office 2019 may be a good option for you if:
• Your organisation is not ready to move to the cloud version at this time
• You only need to install Office programs on 1 device (PC or Mac)
*NOTE: You need to have Windows 10 as your operating system in order to install Microsoft Office Standard 2019

Microsoft 365:
Microsoft 365 is an all-in-one cloud solution with a number of different licensing options to fit your organisation’s needs. Many cloud subscriptions also include installed versions of the application so you can have the same look and feel of the Office applications you are accustomed to using, but built with more robust features and benefits.

Microsoft 365 may be a good option for you if:
• You’d like the ability to work from anywhere and at any time
• You’d like the option to install Microsoft Office programs on up to 5 PCs or Macs, 5 tablets and 5 mobile devices
• You no longer want to worry about the end of support deadlines. Since Microsoft 365 is updated on a regular basis, cloud subscriptions are automatically updated to have the newest features, applications and security updates

Not sure which option is best for your organisation? Please contact us to discuss your requirements.