Re: AW: End of the road for 7.1?

On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 8:23 AM, Steinmetz, Paul <PSteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

They already have access to our system for support purposes, they could
then do their own testing.
2 issues.
1) I don't have any licenses for all the required 3rd party products for
the playground LPAR.

I would hope 3rd party vendors had an easy method of getting trial keys
automatically (or at least without jumping through too many hoops).

We have for years right on our site. Pop in your email and a trial key is
there in your inbox in seconds (it's even sent using MAILTOOL!). Giddyup.
Then again, if a 3rd party vendor doesn't have a trial key system that
could be a problem as well.

2) Some processes that talk to remote servers can't be tested, (those
processes don’t have a remote test system)

Is this just because of TCPIP setup? I've never had this issue as long as
TCPIP is set up properly (which I find it's not on most systems). No DNS
servers specified, host table entries and IP addresses used everywhere
(ugh!!!).

Brad
www.bvstools.com

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Bradley Stone
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2016 8:47 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: AW: End of the road for 7.1?

My point was, what holds you back from supporting a newer release? One of
the biggest selling points of the IBM i is (or was) "forwards"
compatibility.

Is because you use a add-in or ported procedure that won't work on a new
OS version?

I've been an ISV with thousands of customers all of the world for over 20
years. Never had that problem supporting a new release (unless there was
an OS bug, but that's a different story).

I've always been able to support not only old releases, but the latest and
greatest.

We do draw the line, though. Right now it's V5R2/4. Soon it will be
V6R1. Some newer applications may be V7Rx (working on some new things).

I still have people at least a couple times a month ask for V4Rx (and we
can provide one that works if they really want).

We recently announced to our customers the end of support for V5Rx is
coming soon. Mainly because a lot of our applications use SSL and for PCI
reasons a lot of things are changing for SSL that won't be able to be
supported in V5R4.

If someone requires an update on that old release they'll simply pay an
hourly rate to get the fix/update... that is if it's something we feel is
worthwhile to do (and our V5R4 machine is still working, which it probably
will be! lol).

But, I've always stated our software works on the latest OS level...
That's the easy part. At least for in my case :)

Brad
www.bvstools.com