[sims] SIMS Technical Roadmap

[matt40k]

So who's seen the SIMS Technical roadmap (17910) and the countdown till Windows XP\Server 2003\Office 2003 dies.

 

Maybe we should have a party for them?

[TechMonkey]

Any chance of a link?

[Edu-IT]

http://support.capitaes.co.uk/user/resources.asp

 

Just search 17910.

 

Seems Spring 2012 is the time to have moved to Server 2008, Office 2010 and Windows 7 by.

Edited April 20, 2011 by Edu-IT

[NorthernSands]

I find it interesting that Vista is to lose it's support before XP. Nice to see 64Bit Office 2010 support from this Summer.

[laserblazer]

I can't get into the site. So are they saying they will no longer support Server 2003 after Spring 2012. What about XP?

[Arthur]

Here are the dates for the SIMS client application.

 

[b]Support Ends[/b]
.NET Framework 2.0		Summer 2011
.NET Framework 3.5		Summer 2011
Windows Vista (32-bit)		Spring 2012
Office 2003			Spring 2012
Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)	Summer 2012
Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)	Summer 2012
Windows XP (32 bit)		Autumn 2012

 

[b]Support Begins[/b]
Office 2010 (32-bit)		Spring 2011
Office 2010 (64-bit)		Summer 2011
Windows 8			Autumn 2012

 

... and for SIMS SQL Server.

 

[b]Support Ends[/b]
Windows Server 2003 (32-bit)	Summer 2012
Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)	Summer 2012

 

[b]Support Begins[/b]
SQL Server 2008 R2		Spring 2011
SQL Server vNext ("Denali")	Spring 2012

Edited April 26, 2011 by Arthur

[AyatollahPies]

Not going down well on SupportNet

[WithoutMotive]

Sidestepping away from the seriousness slightly, I'd love my racks and patch panels to be this tidy (and empty) and, with that few cables, do you need that amount of concentration?

 

[creese]

Sidestepping away from the seriousness slightly, I'd love my racks and patch panels to be this tidy (and empty) and, with that few cables, do you need that amount of concentration?

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]10055[/ATTACH]

 

Now we know who took SupportNet down yesterday. Get that man's name and number...

[matt40k]

Personally, I'm glad they've finally put a date to the death of XP\2003\Office 2003. It's forcing people to put Win7\2008\Office 2008 on new machines and get rid of those really old computers. I'm not joking when I say I've seen all too many P4 256mb XP machines with SIMS.

 

We all know it'll get moved back closer to the time, but when you think XP is nearly 10 years old! Come on, I accept time it bad, but hopefully people have been budgetting new hardware every 3-5 years and they'll have Win7 licenses on the new kit.

Edited May 6, 2011 by matt40k

[pete]

Confirmed EOL for Nova T4. It's about time.

 

Now how much do I need to bribe Phil for him to bring that EOL date forward to Summer 2011?

 

*hates unfscking things that people break by pushing them into Nova T4 and then sticking them into other things*

[john]

Maybe a silly question, but the XP, Server 2003 points on that list, is that not just Original ones rather than XP SP3, 2003 SP2 etc or are Capita binning the whole lot so XP dies in Summer 2012 as per the info from above?

 

I'm not a SIMS school so cannot ask them / supportnet etc but I have 12 feeder schools who we work with and if its a case of, at present those dates are for all variants of XP, Server 2003 etc then I need to talk to them now as a lot of them will have to budget now to be able to change that hardware & software in-time, even though the dates may change they need to plan that far ahead really due to the budgets they have.

[Arthur]

Maybe a silly question, but the XP, Server 2003 points on that list, is that not just original ones rather than XP SP3, 2003 SP2 etc or are Capita binning the whole lot so XP dies in Summer 2012 as per the info from above?

It's the whole lot from what I can tell. I'm with Matt40k on this. I can't stand XP for much longer (still stuck with CC3).

[PiqueABoo]

Bit late on this one, but if people haven't been (metaphorically) beating up Capita with baseball bats yet they ought to.

 

Summer 2012 is what: 15 months away? Schools are still getting their heads around brave-new-budgets, and Capita wiping out 18+ months for getting some of those struggling little schools with very little money, XP + SIMS onto Win7 (inc. h/w that runs it, s/w that runs on it, a new server/system that supports it) is insane. Similarly SIMS server-side: Why must you have SQL2K8 on 2008[R2] when it runs fine on some 2003 box a school could keep using until Summer 2015?

 

If they don't align more closely with MS extended support termination dates they will seriously hack off a lot of folk. Has anyone from Capita defended that roadmap yet?

Edited May 13, 2011 by PiqueABoo

[matt40k]

Sorry, I'm going to talk about primary schools in general.

 

For me, this needs to happen, Capita must forcely say, XP\2003\Office 2003 ends, this means you have 2 years, as I understand to upgrade at least the server.

 

For me this is a lot of XP machines, about 150 odd. Finally work is forced to move to 7, so any new machines will be 7, any machines in the last year will have a 7 license, so it just needs upgrading. So that any machine over 3-4 years will need replace and at about £700 it's not the end of the world, given it's 2 years before you must have upgraded (Capita only supports 2 previous versions of SIMS) for census.

 

The other added bonus is the fact I won't be having loads of hw failures on the SIMS server. Any other XP workstations hanging off them will be fine as XP, SIMS will no doubt still run, at least until DotNet5 comes out, they might need to upgrade Office, so that's another £30 per machine, but at least they can reuse the license.

 

It's gonna be a lot of work, but it should be happening anyway. It's also going to make central hosting look alot more interesting, specially if schools can't get at least one machine upgraded to 7 in 2 years.

 

Now if Windows 7 was released in 2009, and it's now looking like we must all be 7 by 2013, that's 4 years. I'll image if Capita are smart they'll knock it back at the last min to 2014/5 - hopefully no one wants there MIS on old hw.

 

(PS: Dell PE1430 runs Server 2008 R2 - it's over 5 years)

[Arthur]

Capita have backed down.

 

SIMS Technical Roadmap - Updated Support Dates

Due to the extensive feedback we have received on the SIMS Technical Roadmap we have decided to extend our support dates to give Schools and Local Authorities more time to migrate the latest Microsoft platforms.

 

Microsoft Windows XP support will now be extended a further 12 months until Autumn 2013. The last Microsoft Windows XP compatible SIMS release will therefore be Summer 2013.

 

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 support will now be extended a further 12 months until Summer 2013. The last Microsoft Windows Server 2003 compatible SIMS release will therefore be Spring 2013.

 

Microsoft Office 2003 support will now be extended a further 12 months until Spring 2013. The last Microsoft Office 2003 compatible SIMS release will therefore be Autumn 2012.

 

Please note that all of the above are already in a period of Microsoft Extended Support. This means that whilst we will test our software against the above Microsoft products, there may be cases where it is not possible to provide a fix as it will be reliant on a solution being delivered on the basis of 'reasonable endeavours.'

 

We have also reviewed our support for SOLUS 2 and have extended use of SOLUS 2 for SIMS deployment for another release until Autumn 2012. The last SOLUS 2 compatible SIMS release will now be Summer 2012.

 

The full and updated technical roadmap can be found under resource id: 17910

[PhilNeal]

Do you mean responded to what our customers have told us

[vikpaw]

That's useful considering there are many who have problems on the new kit.

[AyatollahPies]

For various reasons, this news has brightened up my day.

 

It doesn't stop those of you that feel XP and Office 2003 are obsolete, from upgrading your systems before then.

 

Thanks for listening Phil and the team at Capita.

[Jamman960]

Its good to have a little more breathing space, I'd ditch all 3 tomorrow given the chance but we're having to do it in stages, especially as budgets have been slashed

[PiqueABoo]

Capita have backed down

Do you mean responded to what our customers have told us

 

I think it's neither of the above, but I guess it depends on who you talk^H^H^H^H listen to.

 

Capita are still insisting on killing things significantly ahead of Microsoft doing that e.g. roughly 2 years earlier for Server 2003, 18 months earlier for Office 2003, 6 months earlier for XP.

 

In particular WHY?!? is there a need differentiate between XP and 2003 (which runs the SQL 2008 they support for a lot longer)?

 

PS: I'm arguing as someone who's done serious multi-platform dev in the depths of Windows and AFAIC this "oh, we might not be able to get MS to fix their OS" stuff is a crock, as in device drivers it ain't so what are these deep OS dependencies? Why do they care provided whatever they've built their code with e.g. dotNet vN libraries work.

Edited June 14, 2011 by PiqueABoo

[zag]

I was just about to congratulate capita on acutally making a brave decision on Sims but then I saw they backed down

 

Can't believe people will be using XP in 18 months time to be honest! Windows 8 should be out by that time!!

 

People have to remember that longer support for these old technologies means less new features and testing on the current platforms

Edited June 14, 2011 by zag

[TechMonkey]

I was just about to congratulate capita on acutally making a brave decision on Sims but then I saw they backed down

 

Can't believe people will be using XP in 18 months time to be honest! Windows 8 should be out by that time!!

 

Don't forget, it's not necessarily people buying it still, it is not being able to upgrade before then. Schools have to have a decent lead up to these decisions, they can't just decide with 6 months notice they will carry out a major upgrade. & as PiqueABoo says, if it is all right for MS then why are Capita dropping support earlier?

 

We have our own roadmap and we were going to be on the wrong side of a couple of those dates and just squeaking in with the other one. I know a fair few other schools in the area were either in the same position or a worse one.

 

So, thank you Capita for listening but still could do better.

[Jamman960]

The extended lifecycle of XP has caused this mess, very few wanted to upgrade to Vista so downgrading to XP has been the norm until windows 7 came along... we're only making the move to W7 as pc's get replaced. I'd rather not spend money on machines that are going to be replaced in 2-3 years time,

 

I expect we'll have cycled out the XP machines naturally by the time the new deadline comes along, Summer 2012 would have been a bit of a push.

[PiqueABoo]

It's only going to be a mess if Capita make it so. I'm expecting this to cause financial pain for some of those little Primary schools with things like CC3 that can least afford it. They can't afford to upgrade entire system until date X, but to continue using SIMS they have to pay to have some of it 'rearranged' ahead of that date which isn't a trivial cost as a percentage of ICT budget, and reduces money for that entire system upgrade. Gets even messier if they do classroom attendance etc.