Citrix Acronym Soup (Legacy Software)

Acronyms can sometimes be quite confusing. Even though I have been doing this for years and years, I always am surprised to find something new. Tonight I was looking for information on Citrix VideoFrame and found something else. Citrix has a web page for “Legacy Product Matrix Table“. This looks to me a bit like a software graveyard.

Now, on the the acronyms.

• NSC – Notice of Status Change
• EOS – End of Sales
• EOM – End of Maintenance
• EOL – End of Life

This brings us to understanding the “lifecycle” of the software. Citrix has a lifecycle page as well.

There are three true stages:

1. Mainstream Maintenance Phase
2. Extended Maintenance Phase
3. End of Life Phase

Mainstream is normal maintenance. This includes fixing problems and correcting security issues. Extended maintenance is only for doing security fixes. End of life just means that the product is no longer supported.

There is yet another page for Lifecycle definitions. GA (General Availability) is when the product is first released. NSC (Notice of Status Change) is when Citrix announces the intent to eventually stop supporting that release or product. EOS (End of Sales) is when it is no longer possible to buy that product or version of product. In general, there is at least ninety days warning of an impending EOS. This is designed to allow customers to buy more of a designated version or product before it is no longer sold. EOM (End of Maintenance) marks the end of non-security related changes to a release. Typically there is a 12 month warning of a pending EOM. EOL (End of Life) is the end of the road for that product or version. The rule of thumb is that EOL happens six months after the EOM.

So, the flow is GA to NSC to EOS to EOM to EOL. After that is basically limbo.

Just when you thought you had seen enough pages about this, the most interesting page about the current Product Matrix Table appears. This table includes all the current products and there related NSC, EOS, EOM, and EOL are. The exception to this would be products that are still at the GA timeframe and have not reached NSC yet. For example, let us look at the Presentation Server entries.

You will notice that Version 4.5 is not listed. Version 4.0 was declared NSC on February 12, 2007. EOS might have taken place on May 15, 2007 (the chart is a bit confusing here). EOM is June 30, 2009 and EOL is December 31, 2009. This translates to being off version 4.0 by the end of next year unless you want to go it alone.

In the past these kind of arrangements lead to controversy. Many customers want support for software beyond what the software company is willing to provide. Microsoft has had issues with this with operating systems for as long as I can remember.

Let’s look at the “Legacy” table to see what happened to VideoFrame.

It only had one release with a NSC(Sep 30, 2001) EOS(Nov 30, 2001) EOM(Mar 31, 2002) and EOL(Dec 31, 2002). It had a fairly short life. I will do more investigation on this fairly mysterious product later on.

Meanwhile, hopefully you are much more aware of the lifespan of your Citrix products and how they are managed from a Citrix point of view. At least you can investigate the pages for yourself now that you have the basics.

If you made it this far, I am going to through up some kind of reward. Hmm… what should it be?

Why not watch TV? Australian TV? Australia has very few broadcast channels (ABC, 7, 9, 10, SBS) but still manages to have interesting content. Some of the channels have been experimenting with publicly broadcasting on the Internet. Just for fun check out the download site at ABC. The ABC is funded by the government much like PBS in America. Unlike the PBS, they never had fund raisers. Besides that, they have great programs for the whole family.

Check out “Enough Rope“. Andrew Denton interviews very famous people with interesting results. Hope that is more interesting than learning about lifecycles of Citrix software.

About Jeff Muir

Live near Brisbane, Australia. Software developer currently focused on iOS and Android. Avid Google Local Guide