Microsoft Partners Beware: Action Pack To Be Retired in 2025 (theregister.com) 24
Microsoft is to discontinue the Microsoft Action Pack and Microsoft Learning Pack on January 21, 2025, sending partners off to potentially pricier and cloudier options. From a report: The Action Pack and Learning Pack, alongside Silver or Gold Membership, gave Microsoft partners access to many on-premises licenses for the company's software. The company's recommended replacements, Partner Success Core Benefits and Partner Success Expanded, abandon those benefits in favor of cloud services. According to Microsoft, it is "evolving the partner benefits offerings to provide partners with the tools and support they need to continue to lead the way in the shifting tech landscape."
Or cutting back on some things in favor of others. After all, it would never do to have all that software running on-premises when Microsoft has a perfectly good cloud ready to take on partner workloads. A Register reader affected by the change told us: "The first impact for us will be cost. We'll need to go from Action Pack ($515 + VAT) to Partner Success Core ($970 + VAT). Secondly, the benefits appear to have moved all online. "That's not a problem for day-to-day operations but it will make it harder when trying to recreate a customer environment with legacy software."
Or cutting back on some things in favor of others. After all, it would never do to have all that software running on-premises when Microsoft has a perfectly good cloud ready to take on partner workloads. A Register reader affected by the change told us: "The first impact for us will be cost. We'll need to go from Action Pack ($515 + VAT) to Partner Success Core ($970 + VAT). Secondly, the benefits appear to have moved all online. "That's not a problem for day-to-day operations but it will make it harder when trying to recreate a customer environment with legacy software."
Way less relevant with proton (Score:2, Interesting)
There's very few applications I use that require windows these days. Most everything runs on linux with either wine, or it's (semi) replacement, proton
Fusion 360 is about the only thing I use with any regularity that struggles to run on linux, and shapeways runs in the browser so I'm looking at switching over to that.
Message seems clear (Score:3)
The writing on the wall says that if you want to continue doing the microsoft dance then you must start moving to the cloud.
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If you are just using C#, VS2017 express was the last free to use for commercial release,
It’s the I still use for internal LOB winforms app.
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Or hold on to older versions of software.
That is not a wise option for any company. Microsoft's support periods for outdated software these days are quite short. You would be showing signs of true security incompetence to be a business running EOL software.
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I stumbled upon an old 2008 server the other day. It had never had a single windows update installed, and was acting as a domain controller/file server. It never had a single problem, and it DOES have internet access. I tried to tell them that it needs to be removed, but then they asked "Why?" and I couldn't find a reasonable answer. Sure, I could have gone the whole "OMG but it's not updated, nor supported!" route, but since it works perfectly fine, I would have sounded like an idiot.
I, for one, welcome the move to the cloud. (Score:2)
I've been using MS-Word and (to a lesser extent) MS-Excel for decades (hey, who here hasn't?). On Linux systems, I used Star Office/OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Even on my chromebook, I used LibreOffice running under the Linux subsystem. I bought the minimum subscription to MS, got some cloud storage and (more importantly) access to MS-Office in the cloud.
Turns out, MS-Office365 works really great on my chromebook - and I don't have to worry about the occasional difference between OpenOffice and MS-Office (y
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MS excel doe this fine. paste in chunks of 5000 rows at a time, a second wait its fine.
Libre office takes MINUTES to just paste the data, never mind filter or search or lookup. it's horrendous. I didn't even think 250,000 was that much data.
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I find Excel does pretty well up to about 250k rows and then it starts to bog down. At somewhere around 750k much more than searching and scrolling becomes unusable for me. Definitely don't even think about filtering text with a contains filter with that many.
I guess it was a long time ago now, but it still feels pretty recent (I guess I'm olde) that the limit was only 65k rows, so I consider anything more than that large.
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It sounds like you're trying to use Excel as a database, which is the wrong tool for the job.
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The product you're looking for is SQL
If you have more than 1500 rows you're using the wrong tool. Really anything more than about 100 rows, but 1500 is probably where it pencils out to retool using the correct tools.
You can pull a semi truck trailer with a geo metro, geared down really really low, especially on flat ground, but you'd be a lot better off using the correct sized truck. Sqlite is actually, despite the name, quite amazing and full featured. Postgres isn't that much more complex.
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Sometimes it's easier to sanity check my exports in Excel.
Sometimes I even want to highlight things on them before sending them in.
The data is all coming from SQL, but it's nice to verify a row that I was definitely hoping was changed is really changed, so I filter on the ID. It can be quicker than running the query twice for sure.
Definitely checking a bunch of different filters for a fast eyeball check can get quicker than running all of the queries separately.
I definitely don't think that working with 150
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I've had a Word document (in Word 2000, so maybe things are better now) reflow based on which printer I had selected (as in if I changed the printer in print setup and went back to work it caused a page break issue).
Fortunately MS's built in save as PDF works very well (unlike the option that Adobe tries to replace it with "save as Adobe PDF" which pretty consistently generates files that upset printers and look different than your document).
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How would saving it on OneDrive affect anything? (Score:2)
Re: How would saving it on OneDrive affect anythin (Score:2)
The cloud is a trap (Score:2)
..like a roach motel, or Hotel California. You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave
While there may be some cases where the cloud is really beneficial, it most cases, it's a bad thing, really bad
I expect a major backlash in the coming years
Yeah, everyone should run their own servers. (Score:2)
Nooooo (Score:2)
We use action pack for multiple businesses.
The main saving is MS SQL, Visual Studio pro, and Server licences.
There’s no way in hell we are moving our ERP system DB to the cloud so it’s going to cost us a bomb in licensing.
Time to start moving more stuff to open source.
MS wants to become a cloud business.... (Score:2)
They still want to sell Windows as what runs on your "dumb terminal" so it can use all of their paid cloud services/applications. But it's obvious they're trying to migrate everyone to cloud-based subscriptions.
The cloud is absolutely a trap, as someone else commented. But the problem is, a whole lot of companies got comfortable with the idea it's "not their servers, not their responsibility to maintain". I'm sure the bean-counters love the way they just pay predictable monthly or annual fees, instead of I.
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The odd thing I've personally witnessed playing out, though, is that whenever Microsoft has an outage (and they often do!) -- companies will let operations grind to a halt without much complaint. There's that understanding/acceptance that "if Microsoft is broken right now, it's affecting a LOT of people besides just us and all we can do is wait for them to fix it". This same downtime would have had the company thrown into a panic, with top execs breathing down the necks of everyone in I.T. and demanding updates every 10 minutes on the situation.
It's usually their own I.T. complaining louder than anyone else about the Microsoft cloud outages!
This is two fold. At my _current_ company, that's absolutely the outlook. I put out an announcement that (say) Teams is having a problem, everyone grumbles, I'll hear a couple "fuckin' Microsoft"s, but people thank me for telling them. I keep a close eye on things and let everyone know the minute service is restored.
At a previous job, I fought tooth and nail about going from on-prem to O365 (and it was much earlier in 365's history) because that culture was the OPPOSITE of that - if there was a cloud ser
Windows not available (Score:1)
According to https://assetsprod.microsoft.com/pl-pl/benefits-guide-learn-more-about-updated-benefits.pdf, none of the options will include the Windows 10/11 operating system anymore. It only includes the cloud version of it.
I don't see why they are removing that, does MS really think all companies/people will be OK with going to the cloud version of windows?