Microsoft Corp. is pushing back its January 14, 2020 end of support date for Exchange Server 2010 by nine months.
In a blog post published this morning, Greg Taylor, Microsoft’s director of product marketing for Exchange, noted the date was changed after “investigating and analyzing the deployment state of an extensive number of Exchange customers.”
The new October 13, 2020 end of support date for Exchange Server 2010 lines up with the end of support for Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. There is no mention of any changes to the end of support date for Windows 7, which Microsoft has said will no longer get free security updates after January 4, 2020. IT World Canada has reached out to Microsoft for confirmation.
Unsurprisingly, Taylor suggested moving to Exchange Online and Office 365 is the clearest upgrade path.
“If you migrate fully to Office 365 you really don’t need to worry about ‘big bang’ version upgrades any more. You just have to keep a much smaller number of on-premises servers up to date, and you’re good,” he wrote.
Taylor also reminded users that if they want to stay on-premises, they won’t be able to upgrade directly from Exchange 2010 on-prem to Exchange Server 2019.
“You can upgrade to Exchange 2013 or 2016 directly from Exchange 2010 and we recommend you upgrade to Exchange 2016 if you have the choice,” he wrote.
Another looming deadline is for Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 on January 14, 2020. Microsoft offers several options to bridge the pre-upgrade gap. Microsoft Canada’s general manager of cloud and enterprise, Khalil Alfar, has previously said the most straightforward upgrade path is the latest version of SQL Server, currently SQL Server 2017.
