Exchange Server 5.5 Gets One Last Reprieve

Published: January 11, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Users of Exchange Server version 5.5 received a belated Christmas gift from Microsoft yesterday when the vendor announced a change to its product support policy that had an immediate impact on the still-popular e-mail server. As of yesterday, Microsoft will no longer stop supporting products at the ends of months or quarters, but instead will wait until monthly security updates are issued on the second Tuesday of each month. With a final patch issued yesterday, free support for Exchange 5.5 is now officially over.

Since Microsoft implemented its support lifecycle policy in October 2002, it has followed a pattern of ending support for products at the ends of quarters, which correspond with December 31, March 31, June 30, and September 30. However, this apparently rubbed some Microsoft customers the wrong way, as it meant missing out on potential fixes for serious security problems in products that had just reached their end-of-support date a week or two earlier.

Changing these end-of-support dates to coincide with security Patch Tuesdays will allow customers to take advantage of final patches, says Ines Vargas, group manager of Microsoft's Support Lifecycle Program. "We changed the end of support dates to map to the monthly security update release cycle so our customers can take advantage of the latest security updates," Vargas said in a press release. "By eliminating that 10-to-15-day gap, we're making sure that our dates make sense to our customers--that they're even more consistent and predictable."

Yesterday's change will apply to the support policies of all Microsoft's products. But it has a very immediate impact on Exchange Server 5.5, as Microsoft yesterday issued a critical security update to fix a serious flaw in Exchange that could allow an attacker to take over an affected computer; for details on this fix and other patches issued yesterday, see "Microsoft Patches WMF Flaw Early, Issues Two Additional Patches".

Microsoft has had a tough time getting users to upgrade from its Windows NT-era Exchange 5.5 e-mail server to more recent offerings, including Exchange Server 2000 and Exchange Server 2003. Free support had originally been slated to end December 31, 2004, but when Microsoft realized many customers still didn't have upgrade plans, it extended that deadline by a year, which meant support should have ended a week and a half ago. Instead yesterday's Patch Tuesday marked the official end of support for the product.

Microsoft is still not out of the woods when it comes to the Exchange 5.5 legacy conundrum. As recently as last summer, one quarter of all Exchange implementations, or about 400,000 servers, were still running Exchange 5.5, according to an executive with Dell, which launched an Exchange 5.5 migration program last year. While some of these Exchange 5.5 implementations have undoubtedly upgraded to more recent versions of Exchange, it is also likely a good percentage of these users have not.

In May 2004, Microsoft tweaked its product support program from a "five plus two" plan to a "five plus five" plan, which refers to offering free, or "mainstream," support for the first five year's of a product's life, and then offering a period of "extended" support, which is not free, for another five years (only two years of paid support was available under the plan's first iteration.

In the case of Exchange 5.5, Microsoft waived the fee for the first year of extended support. Customers can still opt to pay for extended support, or enter into an "extended hotfix support agreement" for fixes that aren't security related. In any case, Microsoft says it will issue patches for security vulnerabilities it deems critical, even if it's under extended support.

Windows XP Home and Pro users will be the next Microsoft customers to face end of mainstream support. According to a recent update to Microsoft's Windows Life-Cycle Policy Web page, mainstream support for these two operating systems will end when Microsoft launches Windows Vista. Although it hasn't nailed down a solid date yet, Microsoft is expected to launch Windows Vista this fall, in time for the end-of-year holiday shopping blitz.