WinMagic will occasionally deprecate features or functionality within its products. Wherever possible, we wish to ensure that customers have as much advance notice of this as possible.
Decisions to Deprecate Features or Functionality
The decision to deprecate features or functionality can be driven by any of a number of factors, such as:
Product improvements that provide a better or more advanced solution over the feature/functionality being deprecated.
Elimination of functionality within the market by a partner company (for example, Intel ended support for Intel Anti-Theft, making the built-in support for specific Intel AT functionality within SecureDoc and SecureDoc Enterprise Server unnecessary beyond the end of Intel's own support for that functionality).
Technical changes within the product
Technical changes within the underlying program code (such as inability to continue to use code components or coding language constructs that are no longer supported in the present day).
Minimizing Impact on WinMagic Customers
Naturally, occasionally such changes might require that customers may need to integrate changes into their existing install base, so WinMagic will strive to ensure that where any form of change is required to accommodate such deprecation, customers will be given a) as much notice as is possible or practical, and b) will also be provided with information on how to mitigate any considerations arising from such deprecation. These notifications may be through emails, pre-deprecation Release Notes, and will be in Knowledge Base articles. Where necessary, the Knowledge Base Articles and (depending on complexity) the pre-deprecation Release Notes will provide instructions and methods for customers to follow to undertake such mitigations (e.g. by upgrading server or client devices to a more recent version, or through other methods), in order to be prepared for the point of deprecation.
Notification Format
In general, for advance notices of feature deprecation, such Knowledge Base articles will be titled in the following format: Deprecation Notice: <description of feature being deprecated>
In the body of the notice will be information as to what feature will be deprecated, and approximately when (date) this functionality will be deprecated.
Further, there will generally be as early a notification as possible as to in which version of SecureDoc or SecureDoc Enterprise Server customers may expect to see the last support for the feature.
Lastly, if possible at that early pre-deprecation stage, there may be recommendations on how to prepare for the deprecation.
Synonyms: deprecate deprecated terminate EOL end of life end-of-life