Four Microsoft clocks stop on Tuesday

Tuesday, October 13, is the busiest support date on the Microsoft calendar this year. Four separate clocks stop on the same day, and they stop in four different ways. The lifecycle page lists them side by side as if they were the same event. They are not, and the difference decides what you do this week.

Clock one: Office LTSC 2021 reaches end of support. No extended phase, no paid bridge. The desktop suite on the finance team's locked-down machines stops getting security fixes, full stop. Access 2021 and Project 2021 go with it.

Clock two: Windows Server 2022 leaves mainstream support. This one is gentle. Security updates continue at no cost until October 2031. What ends is non-security fixes and design changes. Nothing breaks on Wednesday. It is a planning date, not an emergency.

Clock three: year one of Windows 10 Extended Security Updates ends, and year two starts the next day. We ran the year-two math in July. The short version: the price climbs, the hardware gate has not moved, and the crossover month is closer than finance expects.

Clock four: the third and final ESU year for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 ends. We wrote the fifteen-day triage two weeks ago. Five days remain. If the count is not on the wall yet, do that before reading further.

Four dates, four different severities. The mistake we see is treating them as one deadline and either panicking about Server 2022 or shrugging at Office. Sort them instead.

1. Run one inventory query, today, against the directory and the software inventory tool both. Four columns: Office LTSC 2021 installs, Server 2022 instances, Windows 10 devices on ESU, Server 2012 boxes still answering. Write the four counts next to each other.
2. Classify each count by what actually happens on Wednesday. Office 2021 and Server 2012: unpatched from here on. Windows 10: patched, at year-two prices. Server 2022: patched, free, for five more years. Two of the four need action this week. Two need a line in next year's budget.
3. For the Office estate, check the licensing before the technology. Most organizations with LTSC 2021 bought it for machines that cannot reach the subscription suite: air-gapped labs, regulated workstations, kiosks. Those are the machines that cannot simply be moved to Microsoft 365 Apps either. The candidates are LTSC 2024 or retirement of the machine. Count which, per device.
4. For Server 2022, put October 2031 on the wall now and name the owner. Five years feels like forever. Server 2016 had five years once too, and it runs out in January.

One more thing about Tuesday. The 2012 boxes you could not migrate are now the unpatchable survivors, and they will share a network with the Office 2021 machines that also stop getting fixes. Unpatched server plus unpatched client on a flat network is how a bad week starts. Segment both.

The calendar did you a favor by stacking these. One query, one afternoon, four counts. The estates that do it find the four numbers were never in the CMDB together, and that is the inventory finding, not the deadline.