What is the Support Lifecycle for products that take the R2 designation?
Periodically, Microsoft adds features to a product already in market. In the past, these new features were provided through a Feature Pack or a Service Pack. In response to customer feedback, Microsoft discontinued delivering significant feature additions through Service Packs as customers noted this practice complicated deployment. However, the need to occasionally “refresh” a product’s feature set prior to the next major product release remained. The R2 designation was designed to provide customers with these additional features without the need for a Service Pack or a major version upgrade. As customer deployments of R2 releases are entirely optional, customers may continue to use the initial product release version. The Support Lifecycle for R2 releases are identical to the original product version’s Support Lifecycle and do not change either the Mainstream Support nor Extended Support timeframes for that product.
