Windows 7 downgrade plan changes: News in brief

Article

Windows 7 downgrade plan changes: News in brief

Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director
IT channel news in brief for June 19, 2009

Microsoft restates Windows 7 downgrade plans

IT shops that move to Windows 7 immediately on its October 22 release, now have

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18 months to downgrade those machines to previous versions of Windows, Microsoft said this week.

Paul Degroot, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, in Kirkland, Wash., said that's a big improvement over the six-month deadline the company had originally outlined, according to SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com.

Could Sun ditch hardware?

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s apparent, but unconfirmed, plan to kill off its next-gen UltraSparc chip has some folks wondering if Oracle's buyout of the company marks the beginning of the end for Sun's hardware lines.

The 16-core Rock processor was five years in development but much delayed. Some shops think the company may just ditch all of its hardware efforts under Oracle leadership, according to SearchDataCenter.com.

New lease on life for PerformancePoint

Microsoft will make source code of PerformancePoint Server's financial planning component, the Financial Planning Accelerator (FPA), available to customers and partners on a no-cost, individual license basis.

The decision in January to put a lot of PerformancePoint's capabilities into SharePoint alarmed many Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM partners that had been told to move customers to PerformancePoint from various other Microsoft business intelligence products.

Now, those VARs will be able to keep using and reselling FPA and to customize it, something Microsoft no longer does. Microsoft's move in January was to essentially put the product into permanent maintenance mode, according to SearchDataManagement.com.

Check out yesterday's IT channel news briefs.