If I would take the conversations I have with our clients, prospects, and partners as an indication, I would say that about 90% of enterprise IT teams are interested in Evergreen IT, but maybe only about 20% of them fully grasp the concept enough to know how to practically implement it. And it is an ambiguous concept unless you take the time to research it. This is made harder by the fact that, besides very few information sources, there isn't much information out there.
Lately, there is a lot of talk about XLAs! No, not the Excel add-in but rather Experience Level Agreements between a service provider and a customer with the goal of providing the best employee experience with said provider’s services.
Traditionally, software vendors had service-level agreements, or SLAs, which described expected minimum service levels that the service provider guaranteed (e.g., minimum uptimes or time to respond/repair issues) for the price someone would pay. Until now, SLAs were seen as the crucial measurement for a successful relationship between a software vendor and an enterprise IT department.
By now, I am sure you are aware that Windows 7 has gone end-of-life, with the decade-old OS having received two "final" updates.
If you are still running Windows 7 and want to have security and critical updates that Microsoft deems necessary, you need to be signed up for paid extended support called Extended Security Updates (ESU). While ESU can give you another three years of support at price levels that are easy to budget for, there are other associated risks with staying on Windows 7.
2020 is going to be a big year for enterprise IT teams, with Windows 7 support having ended on January 14th. Even though the expense of paid extended support can easily be budgeted for by most enterprises, there is still a ticking clock counting down to the day when paid support runs out, not to mention other serious risk factors.
Over the past years, Access Capture has helped organizations around the world package and test applications faster, safer, more accurately, and more efficiently in an enterprise environment by automating much of the labor-intensive, costly, and tedious process.
In October 2019, we released Access Capture Version 3 which included many feature and platform improvements. We were thrilled how well it was received so we cannot wait to share with you some details on our jam-packed development calendar for 2020.
Today is the day — Windows 7 is officially at the end of its life. From now on, any organization still running Windows 7 has to go on extended support, called Extended Security Updates (ESU). At this point, if your organization hasn't migrated to Windows 10, you will have no choice but to go on the first year of support.
But what are the costs and risks associated with not migrating to Windows 10, especially if you use all three years of ESU? Today, I want to delve deeper into what you are looking at in terms of financial implications, security issues you might run into, competitive disadvantages you are creating for yourself, as well as the employee and manpower side of things. But before we dive into that, let's review some quick facts about the Extended Security Updates.
When I started application packaging twenty years ago, Microsoft had only just released its installer called MSIEXEC.EXE. The primary goal of Microsoft Installer was to create a generic way to install and uninstall applications on Windows while allowing you to manage and version-control in a structured way.
Back then, Microsoft needed this for its new Office 2000 setup routine on Windows NT and Windows 95 to ensure that each installation of this complicated set of applications behaved and functioned post installation.
The term "Evergreen IT" has been around for some years. It has been defined multiple times in many different ways, but when talking to enterprise IT organizations around the world, more often than not, IT managers and executives complain that they still don't really understand what it means.
Today, I want to kick off a small series of blog articles that tackles the basics of Evergreen IT by defining the term in the simplest way possible (and in less than 100 words!) before taking it apart and going through the details.
If your organization is running Office 2010 and has LOB critical macros or apps, you have a hard deadline of October 13, 2020 to migrate, or you risk continuing to use those apps and macros while running a vulnerable, unsupported version of Office.
Unlike for Windows 7, which goes End-of-Life 9 months earlier on January 14, 2020, Office 2010 will not have extended support, paid or otherwise. This means no security or critical updates, no phone or chat support, it will not be available to download from the Microsoft site, and most online help content will be retired as well. So even if your enterprise puts off migrating to keep certain macros working, you could face issues that affect the entire Office Suite and beyond.
After a bit of a rough year, things are starting to look up: Gartner predicts that IT spending will bounce back to a healthy growth rate of 3.7% in 2020 — largely due to enterprise software spending.
John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said: “The slowdown in IT spending in 2019 is not expected to stretch as far into 2020 despite concerns over a recession and companies cutting back on discretionary IT spending. [...] Most companies are caught trying to either cut costs or invest for growth, but the top-performing enterprises are doing both. A core challenge facing the industry is how organizations can operate as both a traditional company and a technology company at the same time. These ‘and’ dilemmas will drive future IT spending trends.”