Microsoft to End Support for Office 2004 in October

I'm not sure that's so great a plan; I guess they expect everyone to upgrade to Office 2008. I've still got friends that are using the Office before Office 2004....:eek::eek::eek:

I'm not sure that's so great a plan; I guess they expect everyone to upgrade to Office 2008. I've still got friends that are using the Office before Office 2004....:eek::eek::eek:

Not really... their updates aren't really terribly necessary anyways, and MS has a very specific meaning with what this drop in service level means (and to put it in context, Office 2003, which is probably the pre-eminent version of Office in use in any managed installation context, has already entered this phase of support last week, having been released before Office 2004).

Here's from Office 03's page:

Support for the 2003 release

Customers who purchased Office 2003 with a new computer will continue to receive support for the 2003 release products based on their OEM’s or System Builder’s policy. Customers who purchased Office 2003 from a retailer will have access to Mainstream Support until April 14, 2009. This means retail customers can place calls to Microsoft Customer Service and Support about Office 2003-related issues for the following:

* Incident support (no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support charged on an hourly basis)
* Security update support
* The ability to request non-security Hot Fixes

At the end of Mainstream Support, Microsoft offers end-user customers 60 months of Extended Support for the 2003 release until January 14, 2014. Extended Support will allow for:

* Security update support at no additional cost
* Paid incident support options only

During the Extended Support period, non-security related Hot Fix support requires a separate Extended Hot Fix Support contract to be purchased where per-fix fees will apply. Microsoft will not accept requests for design changes, or new features during the Extended Support phase.

So security updates continue into 2014, meaning that Office 2004, like Office 2003, would continue to be safe to use.

MS's reality is that, as long as managed installations feel very little pressure to upgrade (and Office 2007 is pretty unknown on the corporate desktop), people will still be using lots of old versions of Office. I would be surprised if most corporate desktops upgrade past Office 2003 until we get fairly close to 2014....

The headline is misleading. As mkrishnan already pointed out, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is leaving "mainstream" support and moving into the "extended" support phase.

More information is available here:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

Additionally, since Office 2004 is classified as a "business product", it's guaranteed a total of 10 years of some type of support (mainstream, extended and online self help) from Microsoft per the above policy.

"Microsoft will offer a minimum of 10 years of support for Business and Developer products."

This preposterous cash cow has got to end for the hacks at ms at some point, too bad apple or the fos community haven't made that happen.

As stated by an employee of the MBU as of Oct. 23rd:

We're planning on a 2-3 year release cycle, and we're ten months into it right now (since Office 2008 was released in January 2008). So if you assume the lower bound, 24-10=14 months is the earliest for the next release. I wouldn't look for another version of Office to be released at Macworld Expo in January 2009.

This was coming sooner or later. 2004 is still a great product but I do need to upgrade anyway. I'll hold out for the next release.

Let's hope that the next release of Office for Mac is smoother than 2008! :eek:

Let's hope that the next release of Office for Mac is smoother than 2008! :eek:

I'll buy a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac as soon as they bring back full Microsoft Visual Basic/Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro support for Word. I've got a lot of VB-based macros I use, and some of them are required for my work. So I stepped away from Office for Mac 2008 as soon I heard that they'd dropped support for VB on their Mac products.

Instead, I'm still using Office 2003 on my work PC (blech) and via Parallels on my iMac at home (fast like lightning -- but I've got no plans of ever upgrading Word on Windows again); and Office for Mac 2004 on my main desktop (I find Office for Mac 2004 to be a bit slow and buggy).

I read somewhere that they might bring back VB in Mac Office 2010. Hopefully that's true.

I also use the cool, free, open-source OpenOffice.org word-processing software, which is supposed to have some VB support (based, I think, on Star Basic), but I haven't had any luck getting my VB macros ported over to OpenOffice.

The headline is misleading. As mkrishnan already pointed out, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is leaving "mainstream" support and moving into the "extended" support phase.

More information is available here:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

Additionally, since Office 2004 is classified as a "business product", it's guaranteed a total of 10 years of some type of support (mainstream, extended and online self help) from Microsoft per the above policy.

"Microsoft will offer a minimum of 10 years of support for Business and Developer products."

The headline isn't misleading, you're just applying the wrong Microsoft document.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=2490

Extended Support is not offered for Mac Office, probably because it is made by MacBU instead of the the main Office team. I believe MacBU is actually under the Entertainment & Devices division so it's products may well be treated like other consumer, hardware, and multimedia products, ie. not a business or developer product. Office 2004 will only have Mainstream Support which ends in October as reported.

In regards to the next Mac Office, probably Office 2011, I wonder if they'll offer a 64-bit version? Seeing that both Leopard and Snow Leopard support 64-bit GUI apps, and most Macs should now have 64-bit hardware support between the G5, Core 2 Duo, and Gainestown, a larger percentage of Mac Office users could probably run a 64-bit version even if they may not necessarily needs it additional capabilities over a 32-bit version.

i mainly use Entourage 2008 since i bought my mac but it sucks compared to it's windows brethren.

hope the next version of the suite is better integrated with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 w/64-bit support - which i can't wait, full OWA support for FF and Safari (no longer 2 bastard childs to IE).