[WinPartners] Discontinuing Software Support during FY2004

[Deb Bowser]

Date: Monday, 22 September 2003
To: Members of the MIT Community, itpartners at mit.edu, macpartners at mit.edu, 
winpartners at mit.edu, sw-release-announce at mit.edu, ed-tech at mit.edu
From: Software Release Team <swrt at mit.edu>
Subject: Discontinuing Software Support during FY2004
Cc: infosys at mit.edu, itag at mit.edu, swrt at mit.edu

Good Day,

Recently, in an effort to ensure a high level of quality support for the 
Macintosh and Windows platforms, Information Systems reviewed the vast 
combinations of software currently being recommended and supported.

Our review suggests that discontinuing support for the following 
applications, during this fiscal year is vital to maintain quality support, 
improve responsiveness to new vendor releases and make it possible to 
introduce new product offerings.

Would you please review the following matrix and let us know by Tuesday, 
September 30th if retiring any of the following software and/or hardware 
from general support imposes a significant burden to your Department and/or 
the client community you support? If significant burdens are apparent, we 
are prepared to work with you to help ease the difficulties in migrating to 
a more current environment.

Windows software slated for retirement on December 31, 2003:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Acrobat Reader 4.0
BrioQuery 5.5
Dreamweaver 4.0
FileMaker Pro 5
FileZilla 1.9.7
Internet Explorer  5.5
Kerberized Line Printer 1.0
Kerberos for Windows 2.1
Tivoli Storage Management 4.1.3
VirusScan 4.5.1 SP1


Macintosh software slated for retirement on December 31, 2003:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Acrobat Reader 4.0
BrioQuery 5.5
Dreamweaver 4.0
Fetch 4.0.2
FileMaker Pro 5.0
Kerberos for Macintosh 3.5
Kerberized Line Printer 2.1.1
Virex 7.0


Windows software slated for retirement on June 30, 2004:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Office 2000 - Mainstream support from Microsoft will end on June 30, 
2004.  We are waiting to see what happens with the expected MS Office 2003 
to determine the best migration path to recommend.


Macintosh Operating Systems slated for retirement on June 30, 2004:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mac OS 9 (All versions)  - Apple stopped shipping machines with OS 9.x in 
January 2003.  We would like to have everyone moved to some version of Mac 
OS X by June and will likely not be releasing new versions of software for 
Mac OS 9 between now and then.


Windows Operating Systems slated for retirement on December 31, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Windows 2000 Professional - Mainstream support from Microsoft will end on 
March 31, 2005.


In closing, we appreciate the Community's assistance and involvement in 
Software Release and look forward to your responses by September 30, 2003.

Deb Bowser
MIT Information Systems
Test Manager
Software Release Team
W92-176
Ph:     617-253-3879
Fax:    617-258-8736
http://web.mit.edu/swrt/