On April 8, 2014, Microsoft will officially end support for Windows XP and Office 2003. The company urges system administrators that still have PCs running Windows XP and Office 2003 in their organization, to start migrating them to Windows 7 and Office 2010. In a blog post, Microsoft said that as technology continues to evolve, modern users have an ever increasing need to protect data and ensure security, compliance and manageability, by taking advantage of the modern Windows and Office software. The company also outlined the importantance for companies to complete deployment before support runs out.

Microsoft is offering many tools to help administrators with the migration to the new software platforms. These include adviced available on The Springboard Series on TechNet, , Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) products (Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring), Windows Intune and Office 365.

Microsoft also announced that Windows Vista will exit mainstream support today. In a product's extended support phrase, Microsoft continues to provide security patches to all users, but offers other fixes -- such as reliability and stability updates -- only to organizations that have signed support contracts with the company.

Some weeks ago, Microsoft also extended support for the consumer versions of Windows Vista -- as well as Windows 7 -- by five years to synchronize their support lifecycle with that of the comparable enterprise editions.