This post has been UPDATED and can be found HERE (November 2019).
Microsoft’s Support Lifecycle policy provides consistent and predictable guidelines for product support availability when a product releases and throughout that product’s life. By understanding the product support available, customers are better able to maximise the management of their IT investments and strategically plan for a successful IT future.
The support lifecycle for Dynamics CRM products is summarised below:
|
Version |
Lifecycle Start Date |
Mainstream Support End Date |
Extended Support End Date |
| Dynamics CRM 4.0 |
29th Feb 2008 |
9th Sep 2013 |
10th Oct 2018 |
| Dynamics CRM 2011 |
18th May 2011 |
12th Jul 2016 |
13th Jul 2021 |
| Dynamics CRM 2013 |
12th Jan 2014 |
8th Jan 2019 |
9th Jan 2024 |
| Dynamics CRM 2015 |
11th Feb 2015 |
14th Jan 2020 |
14th Jan 2025 |
Full details can be found at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle?c2=629.
Extended Support
KMS recommend you keep your products within the mainstream support. Once into extended support Microsoft will stop any feature development, stop issuing non-security updates or hot-fixes, plus you may start to run into compatibility issues with related software e.g. new versions of MS Office, updated browsers and updated server versions.
Is it time for cloud?
One of the huge benefits of Dynamics CRM Online, is that you no longer have to worry about the compatibility of underlying Operating Systems, SQL Servers and a host of other software as all of those server-side considerations are taken care of. This means you can focus on the important things like making use of new features and updating user knowledge. Moving to the cloud means it could be the last CRM upgrade (in the traditional sense) you ever need to do.
If you’re currently on CRM 2011 (or even CRM 2013), now is the time to start planning your next move and cloud is certainly worth a look.