What is the End of Service Date for v8.6.3

A question for the Instantiations people.  What is the End of Service date for 8.6.3?

I am currently working for a VERY risk averse company, and I am trying to put together some information on an upgrade that they need to do to a current applicaiton written mostly in 8.0.3.

While I believe that they should just move to 9.0.1, I need to put together information on support levels, end of service timeframes, etc. in order to build my case.   Any information in this regard would be greatky appreciated.  I already know about the 64bit VMs and the improvements in 9.0..............

Thanks!

*Steve*

Companies with revenue generating, mission critical and expense systems are going to be risk averse.

Many of our customers fall in this category and is a driving factor on why we place so much emphasis on backwards compatibility and a thought out and documented migration path for our product.

That being said, a continuous push to move products forward is responsible care taking so I can understand and appreciate your position.

We don't actually end-of-life a given version of VA Smalltalk (I know this maybe doesn't help your case:).  Really what I mean here is that folks with an active support license can get technical support for whatever version of VAST they happen to be running.

This support is often instructional in nature or bug fixing.  Actually we don't typically have hard boundaries on support. If you have a problem and someone on our team can help, then we will.  The team culture has never been a fan of the "That's not my department" mentality...we want our customers to succeed.

Some things we don't typically do is backport features or go back to old releases and create patches.  For example, we are beginning to formalize our patching more, and we released 9.0.1 in November.  However, we don't

go back to select versions of 7.x and 8.x and backport these patches.  We have one continuous stream of development for the product.

My experience in supporting back-leveled customers is that they sometimes run into difficulties because they want capabilities from newer versions of VAST, but those capabilities take advantage of foundation code only available in later versions of VA Smalltalk...so there is often little hope of backporting it unless they want to spend tremendous energies attempting it.

Honestly, 8.0.3 -> 8.6.3 or 9.0 is not a huge jump in terms of migration issues.  In the past we've actually done IBM VisualAge 3.x or 4.x -> 8.x.  I will say...that can get difficult.  It's best not to wait that long if possible:)

Please let me know if you have additional questions and I will be happy to answer them.

Kind Regards,

-- Seth Berman

On Friday, January 12, 2018 at 4:36:43 PM UTC-5, Steven LaFavor wrote:

Howdy all....

A question for the Instantiations people.  What is the End of Service date for 8.6.3?

I am currently working for a VERY risk averse company, and I am trying to put together some information on an upgrade that they need to do to a current applicaiton written mostly in 8.0.3.

While I believe that they should just move to 9.0.1, I need to put together information on support levels, end of service timeframes, etc. in order to build my case.   Any information in this regard would be greatky appreciated.  I already know about the 64bit VMs and the improvements in 9.0..............

Thanks!

*Steve*