Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

    One thing you andf your site management should consider is that we are
    about to ship V3.0 of ALL-IN-1. Versions V2.3 and V2.4 are currently in
    the field and supported.
    
    Without wishing to put words into the mouths of my revered colleagues
    at the Atlanta support centre, it is my recollection that the
    corporation's normal policy is only to support the currently shipping
    and previous versions. This would seem to imply that your V2.3 system
    will become unsupported before long.
    
    What's also likely is that any serious problems reported against V2.3
    will either be answered with upgrade to V2.4/V3.0 or only patched in
    those versions. This is to reduce the amount of Engineering we have to
    do in producing patches for multiple versions.
    
    Back to your original question: By a similar line of argument, we only
    do validations of new VMS versions against supported ALL-IN-1 versions,
    so sooner or later you'll get into a situation where you'll be running
    an unsupported combination, even if you aren't already!
    
    Why not do an upgrade to V2.4? It's a pretty painless process, buys you
    quite a lot of bug fixes, and gets you into a supported version for
    quite a long time.
    
    Sorry for the length,
    
    Graham

Thanks for the reply.

I'll work the logic of upgrading with my customer once again.  However, 
I'm concerned that they will interpret this answer to mean that they should 
go with their original plan -- keep their ALL-IN-1 cluster at VMS 5.4-3 so as
avoid the concerns mentioned about validating new VMS versions against supported
ALL-IN-1 versions.  They initially stated that they would want to avoid 
upgrading the cluster to VMS 5.5 because they planned to stay at ALL-IN-1 V2.3
for the rest of its projected life at their site (that is until full migration
to, "guess what ??" -- Office/Vision, is complete).

They have done extensive enhancements to the ALL-IN-1 base system to support 
their business folks and are not interested in going through several painful 
upgrades to remain current.  We all know that they'll (or maybe me) will pay for
this in the end when things start going funky.

Any other words of caution or examples of problems they might expect are 
appreciated.  I'll try to piece together a story that will convince them.  I 
have heard them whisper amongst themselves that if Digital tells them that not 
upgrading just won't work then, they might have to convince corporate that
upgrades will be required.

Thanks

V2.3 to V2.4 is generally not a painful upgrade.  I concur with .1 that
it would benefit the customer with (presumably) a minimum of effort.

Now we all know that the customer is always right (because we listen to Don
and nod our heads a lot when he's talking), so we know that their move
to Office Vision is the right-thing-to-do for them.  But I just *have*
to say that I think they'll be waiting a long, long, long time before 
moving off A1 if they are going to wait for I*M to deliver Office Vision.

K.

    And of course, if you ask this question in the VMS notesfile, they'll
    say the same as I did about support of *their* old versions!
    
    Graham

    IOSG actually certified ALL-IN-1 v2.3 against VMS 5.5 but they
    probably forgot to tell GAP (:==:) the rest of what he says is of
    course good common sense.
    
    The Atlanta CSC's position (and i'm paraphrasing the official statement
    which has lots of long words in it!) is to recommend not to upgrade
    to VMS v5.5 unless you need to for new hardware requirements - there is
    a note with about 20 replies (134) on this topic. This is pending the
    release of a patch from VMS to solve the last of the Queue Manager &
    Lock Manager problems - this is irrespective of ALL-IN-1 version.
    
    ALL-IN-1 v2.3 is still supported but we have had our expectations set 
    that an announcement will arrive on our desks soon officially retiring
    it effective 31-DEC-1992 which is still some time off.
    
    As always the customer is right but i'd recommend going to v5.5 soon
    and either upgrading to v2.4 or all the way to DIAMOND before the
    end of the calendar year.
    
    Regards,
    
    Andrew.D.Wicks

As Andrew said V2.3 will become unsupported in the near future. 

The normal policy is that on (or soon after) FCS of a new version notices go 
out to customers with support contracts that the 2 versions ago product 
becomes unsupported after a specific date. That date is normally about 6 
months after FCS of the new version.

When a version of ALL-IN-1 becomes unsupported that means that there will be
no more patches and calls to the CSC will be handled on a best effort basis 
only.

The CSC will never turn away a customer with a contract (we often don't turn
away customer who do not have contracts, but that's another story), however 
we have to give priority of customer running supported versions of software, 
and we can not promise to fix the problem (no new patches). The solution in
such cases is often to upgrade to a supported version where the bug is fixed.

The policy of the CSC is to do whatever we can for the customer, provided
that does not impact our ability to provide a quality service on the
officially supported versions of products.

We still get the occasional V2.2 call, and I hear we got a V2.1 call a few
weeks ago. I also hear rumours that we got a V1.something call last year, but
I can not confirm that :-)

Doing what we can for customers...

Terry

Thanks to you all for the ammunition.  I am going to try and press them pretty
hard.  The customer is always right, of course.  However, we can help them be
more right.

	One thing to "sell" the v2.4 ALL-IN-1 is Group Confgerencing
	(I used this for several customers up here). Version upgrade
	means pain and work, but customers are always interested to
	get new features - and VAXNotes is a good one!

							Hannu