End of the Line For MS Office XP

Microsoft’s Office suite has come a long way. One of its oldest, most used versions, Office XP will be discontinued on the 11th of July, 2011. In doing this, Microsoft will no longer offer patches and updates to the aging office suite. Just last week, Microsoft released a service pack for their Office 2010 office suite. Users of Office XP received five years of support and another five years of extended support. Office XP was released in May 2001 and it’s been more than a decade since its launch.

Program continues to function, service updates halted

Microsoft has stated that the version of Office will continue to function, but future updates won’t be available, and so they do not recommended using it. Microsoft also has been in the news for their new Office 365 web suite that's direct competition to the Google Docs Office suite. It’ll be interesting to see how many users actually move from Google Docs and the entire Google suite to Microsoft’s alternative. Most users, including large organisations have moved from their traditional mail services to Google. Those on tighter budgets are using Oracle’s OpenOffice suite.