Very well put and 100% true.

But just remember, if you are in the middle of a necessary recovery and you
are having serious difficulties whether it is unforeseen issues or self
imposed ones, you may be completely reliant on adsm.org as your only
resource to turn to. Everything ran fine for quite a while at 4.1.*.* with
all the clients at the same level. A couple of restores were causing
problems and not being able to call IBM for support only made the problem
appear to be worse than it was. I was told that there is no support for
4.1.1.1 or tdp for Exchange 1.1 . I was getting some general assistance from
initial phone support but no calls would escalate to level 2 or beyond,
which is what I needed.

One other thing to mention here, we have 2 years of TDP for Exchange 1.1
backups that can not be restored using 2.2 or 5.1.5 dp for exchange. For
legal reasons I am reliant on an unsupported software for the next two
years.


Duane Ochs
Systems Administration
Quad/Graphics Inc.
414.566.2375

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Sims [mailto:rbs AT BU DOT EDU]
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 7:07 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: End Of Support V4.2


>So, if I understand you correctly.  My 350 clients, which I just upgraded
to
>4.2, will only be supported until April 15th. ...

I think a lot of confusion is being generated by the nebulousness of the
term "supported" in all this.  If you review some of the Tivoli announcement
letters you will find the definition:

  End of Service (EOS): Defect support for Tivoli products will generally be
  provided only for the current release and the most recent prior release. A
  prior release will be eligible for service for 12 months following general
  availability of the current release. These releases will be supported at
the
  latest maintenance ("point release") level.

So, cessation of support means that you can't call in with a problem in the
use of a 4.2 client and expect IBM to open the old modules and start writing
fixes for them.  It in no way means that your software functionally falls
apart
on that date.

The other aspect of "supported" comes into play as a definition of tested
compatibility.  This you will find defined in chapter one of the Clients
manual, under "Upgrade path for clients and servers", the assurance that the
4.2 client will work with the 5.1 server, as determined by architectural
design decisions and subsequent vendor testing.

If you've been with the product for a period of years, you come to
appreciate
that you can happily keep and live with an older version/release for quite a
while, often far longer than the assured compatibility can guarantee.  Your
installed software may remain viable longer than you!

This all goes to show the agitation that comes from the loose employ of
industry terminology.

  Richard Sims, BU