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Who knows what’s buried under years & years of computer coding in applications that businesses rely on?
I remember back in my past working for Littlewoods in the (ICT) Group Management Services team in mid 1980's Liverpool Old Hall Street, how much of the transactional processes relied on old COBOL code from the late 1960's. Its the same with many banks too. Not surprising why Microfocus COBOL skills are still quite valuable and saleable for high day rates in some places.
With COBOL there were few outside factors that needed to be taken into account of course. It's a different story now that applications written in the 90's and naughties, are built like an onion, on top of a whole complex technology stack, most likely an ever-changing Microsoft one.
Sometimes its ever-changing because companies are being taken over and technology/solutions re-purposed, other times because security threats are being tackled, or new technologies arrive such as the internet or Bluetooth.
I have encountered the former with a housing/care client of mine, having a reseller build a new Microsoft Dynamics365 solution for them. The reseller had utilised a licenced add-in, billed £40k for doing it and then on finding Microsoft had purchased the add-in then killed it, wanted to bill them another £35k to use an alternative add-in. Unfortunate you might say, but Microsoft had already given notice 3 months before, the reseller started work, that the add-in was to be killed off. So in that case, I helped put a successful case together for not being billed any more on this.
On the whole, suppliers such as Microsoft, will give ample notice where this sort of thing will be happening. For Silverlight, Microsoft gave tens years notice. That doesn't mean that plenty of solution providers have got rid of it out of all those solutions as yet, I could name several in SocialHousing still 'promising' or 'moving' to remove it.
Where individual businesses or organisations have built their own applications, at least they have a chance to look at their technology stacks and determine vulnerabilities you would reasonably expect. Of course good system/program documentation is needed there.
Bigger software providers should be at an advantage in hearing first about these types of up-coming changes, being plugged into Microsoft, Oracle or other suppliers more closely, via Gold & Silver partnerships etc, evidenced by blocks of plastic in their reception areas. Strangely this is often not the case, with some software suppliers getting 'caught out' when the brown stuff just hits the helpdesk, via customer support calls.
One such Social Housing management solution (which I wont name, but if you have encountered the problem you know who I am writing about), with 30 or more customers across the UK and Ireland, came a cropper of one of these this month. It was announced by Microsoft in December 2017, the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 protocols were to be deprecated. This has been around since 1999, so many applications written using Visual Basic/C# etc and other languages will have potentially made much use of this security protocol. The plug was pulled on it at the end of October 2021 and that’s when some user problems started.
Many users have encountered inability to automatically send emails and other issues, that seriously blunt any ‘Digital First’ methodology being pursued. An email exchange I have seen, goes from the supplier help desk to a an infrastructure company asking to check if anyone had ‘manually disabled TLS1.0 support’. The answer quite pointedly was that ‘Microsoft no longer support connections to Exchange Online using TLS1.0 or 1.1, both version were depreciated over a year ago. Are you able to use TLS1.2 in your application? If not, please let us know a secure method of sending emails from your application’. Very embarrassing. Apparently a full rebuild and release of the application is planned. Until then, keep manually saving and emailing without any automation.
Now this is a housing system that has changed hands a couple of times, but that does not stand as a valid excuse. However, software suppliers, who all charge a significant annual charge for maintenance & support, should be capable of knowing what their solutions rely upon and adequately anticipate these kind of things coming up, particularly with three years or more notice.
Legacy windows applications, particularly on old client-server solutions are clearly more susceptible to many of these types of issues. No wonder most organisations have a direction of travel to fully browser presentation and SaaS in the Cloud. I would be surprised if this particular housing system fault has not driven a few more in that direction this month!
Caveat Emptor - Let the buyer beware. What worked in your COTS solution for the last decade, may not be working at some point in the future…
Related Post: Just because different modules come from the same Supplier, does that mean they have good integration (or are integrated at all)?
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XTC - The Ugly Underneath.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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