Keep your Microsoft Software up to date!

Microsoft aims to provide ten years of product support (a minimum of five years Mainstream Support and a minimum of five years Extended Support). However, you do have to keep your service packs up to date as these extend, in most cases, the life of the product. Mainstream support begins upon product release and means that Microsoft is maintaining, updating and adding functionality. Extended support then means that new features and complementary support stops but bugs are still fixed and patched.

Not upgrading before the end of extended support is a very risky thing to do as when extended support stops so do security updates. It would be best if you did not wait until the last minute to make the change as upgrading may take some time, and you do not want to expose yourself from a security point of view.

This Microsoft Lifecycle Policy page gives you cutoff dates for the availability of support throughout the life of Microsoft products.

It is very important for you to remember that if you are using SYSPRO, it is running your business and should be running on a secure environment with up to date software and IT equipment to ensure that it is always available to you.

Extended support for Windows 7 (SP1) will stop in just under one year, on 14 January 2020 at which point you should have upgraded to Windows 10.

Extended support for SQL 2008 R2 (SP3) ends on 9th July this year consider updating to a later version.

Below I have detailed server and desktop products that relate to the SYSPRO community.