[175] in sw-release-announce
Windows at MIT: what's happening now and in the future
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan McIndoe Hunt)
Mon Jul 8 14:24:58 2002
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20020708133701.03be7cb0@hesiod>
Date: Mon, 08 Jul 2002 14:14:41 -0400
To: itpartners@MIT.EDU, winpartners@MIT.EDU, sw-release-announce@MIT.EDU
From: Jonathan McIndoe Hunt <jmhunt@MIT.EDU>
Cc: infosys@MIT.EDU, itag@MIT.EDU
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Good Afternoon,
We have had a busy year so far on the Windows platform. Microsoft released
Windows XP back in October of 2001. We have been preparing to support
Windows XP and are on track for this fall. Microsoft is retiring the older
versions of Windows and MIT must follow suit. The remainder of this note
provides an update on the various efforts and some details around the
retirement of Windows 98/ME/NT and the availability of Windows XP licenses.
Windows XP Discovery and Release Efforts
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Windows XP Discovery team was launched at the end of February to look at
what it means to support a Windows operating system. The project conducted
a survey which gathered a lot of information on what you the customers
would like from support and what applications are critical to a migration
to WinXP. The Discovery team is wrapping up its work and will publish its
report soon.
Windows XP Discovery Project Notebook: http://web.mit.edu/is/discovery/winxp/
We are currently gearing up the Windows XP Release Team to get support
ready for Windows XP. Many things are already underway, such as a recent
series of 3 day System Administrator training courses that the AI lab
arranged. We will make support for Windows XP available as quickly as we
can. Further communications regarding Windows XP work will follow in the
coming weeks.
Windows XP Licenses
------------------------------------------------------
Information Systems has purchased a large number of Windows XP Professional
licenses for MIT employees and has received a grant from Microsoft of a
number of licenses for MIT students. These licenses will be available
shortly, hopefully in July. A form to request licenses will be available
from http://web.mit.edu/is/products/vsls/ as soon as we are ready to accept
and process requests. The reason for purchasing these licenses is to
encourage folks that are currently running older versions of Windows to
upgrade at no cost to Windows XP. If you have a machine with less than one
year of useful life remaining, we recommend that you do not invest the time
to upgrade that machine but rather purchase a new machine with Windows
XP. Even though we are not supporting Windows XP yet, we want to make the
licenses available to those that would be purchasing XP anyway. If you are
purchasing a new machine, we recommend that you get the operating system
that you plan to use with the new machine.
Windows 98/ME/NT Retirement Plans
-------------------------------------------------------------
As we continue to announce support for new operating systems, we also need
to retire older versions. Our current targets are:
Windows ME - December 2002
Windows 98/NT 4 - June 2003
We will begin with Windows ME, targeting retirement for December 2002
followed by Windows 98 and NT 4.0 in June 2003. Based on what we have
heard from you as well as other data, such as the hits on certain web
pages, we do not expect the Windows ME retirement to require significant
resources. Windows 98 and NT 4.0 still make up a large portion of our
environment, so we ask that you begin thinking about moving to newer
operating systems. The hope is that many of the machines that are
currently running Windows 98 or NT 4.0 will be replace by next June and you
will not need to invest effort to upgrade those machines. As Departments
plan for these upgrades, if we can be of any assistance, please contact me.
Microsoft has already begun to retire these operating systems and at some
point Microsoft will stop releasing patches or security fixes for older
operating system. Microsoft has set that date for Windows NT 4.0 and
98/98SE will be June 30, 2003. The current Windows OS Lifecycle
information from Microsoft can be found at
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle.asp.
We continue to support Windows 2000 and will for at least the next two years.
If you have any further questions regarding the Windows platform and any of
the topics above, please send them to me, jmhunt@mit.edu.
Thanks,
Jonathan
p.s. If there are others within your department that this information would
be valuable to, please forward this message along.
____________________________________________
Jonathan M. Hunt
Windows Platform Coordinator and Team Leader
Software Release Team
Information Systems
W92-191 x3-0172
