Microsoft Dynamics CRM Support Lifecycle

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.