Microsoft SP3

Goodness, it's been a long time since our last post! We've been exceptionally busy beavers over the last few months, and it's been hard to find a moment to sit down and really research what's been going on in the market today. Of course, like most companies with any kind of technical aspect, we're currently making a plan for how to handle Microsoft XP's imminent cutoff date of June 30th, 2008. For those of you who might not know, Microsoft had originally decided to stop selling XP on January 30th, but pressure from the community of programmers and developers who weren't ready to update their programs in order to make them compatible with Microsoft Vista caused Microsoft to extend the deadline to June 30th. Now the community is trying again to get Microsoft to give us a little more time, but this time Microsoft seems relentless in it's determination to close the books on XP for good. So what we've decided to do is set up two test machines here in our lab that are going to be exposed to every flavor of Windows Vista over the next two months, including both "home" and "business" levels of the operating system, in order to see which of our point of sale programs will function correctly on the new operating system and which will not. For those that work, no problem - we can simply start releasing those packages with Windows Vista for new sales starting in July, and ensure that our standard 30 days of free customer support includes answering any questions our customers might have about how to navigate through the Vista OS. For those that don't work, we're probably going to follow Dell's example and buy the version of Vista that comes with "downgrade rights" to Windows XP, which will allow us to continue providing excellent point of sale service in an XP environment. Then, as our developer partners make their programs Vista-compatible, we'll be able to offer our customers the ability to upgrade back to Vista if they so choose.

Overall, we're doing our best to make sure the transition is invisible to our customers. Both XP and Vista are superb operating systems, and the POS software experience shouldn't be significantly impacted either way.

Ironically, XP is getting the axe just as it's latest new bundle of patches and fixes, Service Pack 3 (or SP3 as we techies call it), hits download centers everywhere. If you've left automatic updates on your computer, then chances are that you have it already. However, if you are a customer using Microsoft Retail Management System, or RMS, you'll find that you did not receive this update from Microsoft. PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS UPDATE ON YOUR OWN! Microsoft discovered in testing that part of the SP3 patch is incompatible with RMS, and causes it to cease functioning. The automatic downloader theoretically checks to see if you have RMS before downloading Service Pack 3, and if you do then it doesn't start the download. We haven't seen any widescale issues with Service Pack 3 on any other platform, so everyone else should be okay.

That's hardly all the news for the moment, but there's a new system being born with Aldelo for Restaurants that wants me to program it's menu, so I'll chat with you again soon. Take care!