[Macpartners] Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" Retirement

[Albert Willis]

Effective June 30, 2007, Information Services and Technology will  
retire Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" as a supported operating system.

What this means:
	- IS&T will no longer create custom installers, write documentation,  
provide training or provide helpdesk support for Mac OS X 10.3 after  
June 2007.
	
	- Keeping with its policy of supporting the most current version of  
an operating system and its predecessor, IS&T will begin to ramp up  
support for Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" when it's released this Spring  
while we continue to provide full support for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger."
	
	- Support providers in departments, labs and centers have about 5  
months to plan their migration to a newer version of Mac OS X.

Why Mac OS X 10.3 is being retired
	- Vendors are dropping support for Mac OS X 10.3. New versions of  
IS&T-supported applications that will be released soon to the MIT  
community--SAPgui 7.0, Tivoli Storage Manager 5.4 and VirusScan 8.5  
for Macintosh--will not run on Mac OS X 10.3. Future releases such as  
Microsoft Office 2008 and Adobe Dreamweaver, shipping later this  
year, will also likely not run Mac OS X 10.3.
	
	- Due to Mac OS X 10.3 being over three years old and with the  
release of a new operating system (Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard") this  
Spring, it's likely that Apple will stop providing updates for Mac OS  
X 10.3 in the near future.

If you have any questions regarding IS&T's plan to discontinue  
support for Mac OS X 10.3, please contact the Software Release Team  
at swrt at mit.edu.


______________________________
Albert Willis
Macintosh Platform Coordinator - Software Release Team
Client Support Services
Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
awillis at mit.edu