What’s up with Service Pack support

What’s up with Service Pack support
The Service Pack Support policy is sometimes misunderstood by our customers. As I mentioned on some of the previous postings, support in the Mainstream Support and Extended Support phases is only provided at the supported service pack level. This means that you must be running a supported service pack to continue to receive security updates or be eligible for any of our other support options (such as Premier, Pro or Pay Per Incident cases).

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When a new service pack is released, Microsoft will provide either 12 or 24 months of support for the previous service pack, varying by product family. We no longer make the decision of 12 or 24 months of support for each individual service pack release. Instead, this decision is made at the product family level (for example, Windows, Office, Servers, or Developer tools) and will be consistent across a product’s service pack releases.

Of course, when support for a product ends, support for the product’s service packs will also end. The product’s Support Lifecycle supersedes the Service Pack Support policy, to ensure that we don’t provide support for a service pack when the parent product is no longer supported.

Let’s try an example... When Windows XP SP2 was released in September 2004, it started the end of support clock for Windows XP SP1. For the Windows product family, we provide 24 months of support for the previous service pack. Therefore, support for Windows XP SP1 ended 24 months following the release of SP2 -- on October 10, 2006. When Windows XP SP3 is released, it will begin the end of support clock for SP2 -- ending 24 months following the release of SP3.

Here's another example, this time using Office 2003. When Office 2003 SP3 was released in September 2007, it started the end of support clock for Office 2003 SP2. Since the Office family provides 12 months of support for the previous service pack, support for Office 2003 SP2 will end on October 14, 2008. Support for Office 2003 SP3 will continue until 12 months following the release of SP4 or support for the product ends.

You may notice that we don't end support for products or service packs on the same date they were released. Instead, we round the end dates to the second Tuesday after the end of the quarter. We'll discuss this in a future posting.

In the meantime, please tell us what you think! Does this better explain the Service Pack Support policy? What can we do better to explain this on our main site?