Microsoft Corporation warned users last week that it will drop support for Office 2003 Service Pack 2 in three weeks, urging them to upgrade to a newer service pack that was involved in a squabble earlier this year over blocked file formats.
The company's policy is to support an Office service pack for 12 months after it releases a successor and then extends that 12-month period to the following month's second Tuesday being the day it usually issues security updates.
Microsoft rolled out Office 2003 SP3 in September 2007.
"Any security updates released on or before October 14 will support both Service Packs 2 and 3," said a Microsoft employee’s blog posting. "Security updates released after October 14 will support only Service Pack 3."
Microsoft has fixed 14 deficiencies in Office 2003 SP2 in the past two months alone. The package also made news earlier this year when the company apologized to rival, Corel Corporation for blocking some of their file formats on the grounds that they posed security threats.
Office 2003 SP3 instituted new security policies that automatically blocked a number of older file types; most of which were Microsoft-designed formats, although some third-party formats were also restricted.
Microsoft defended the move last January, when it said "some older file formats are insecure" and "the decision to block the formats is strictly to protect your machine from being compromised."
Users complained loudly on Microsoft's support forums soon after Office 2003 SP3 was issued and just last week, the company urged users to update to SP3. The update is free to Office 2003 users and can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.
Although Microsoft launched Office 2007 in late 2006, it will continue to support Office 2003 until early April 2014, according to its product life cycle site.
