I’d like some of our clients to give serious consideration to retiring some aging hardware and software that is still out there: Server 2003 and Windows XP.
Microsoft is ending support for XP on April 8, 2014. I still see hundreds of XP systems out there on client systems we help support – now is the time to put them out to pasture with a new Windows 7 or 8 based system. We’ll even help you donate the carcass of your old computer to Free Geek (after wiping the drives of course).
Server 2003 is getting really long in the tooth as well (it’s ten years old now), and I also still see plenty of Server 2003 systems on my management dashboard. You may say, I’ve got this really great backup system you sold me, so if it crashes, you’ll come fix it for me – right? Our techs have actually heard this from customers. The idea of a great BDR (Backup and disaster recovery) system is to recover from unplanned failure. Neglecting to upgrade your server for ten years is just asking for trouble!
Plus, if you are running Exchange, there is no direct upgrade path from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2013 (but there is to Exchange 2010 – that option may be disappearing soon as well if Microsoft decides to stop selling Exchange 2010). At that point, your only option will become hosted exchange and/or the use of a third-party migration tool. Those tools don’t migrate public folders, either.
So – make life easy on yourself and your friendly IT support folks at SpireTech – upgrade now while things still work – don’t wait until they break, for our sake and yours.