Adobe Flash end of support 2020 - WING GUI 5.9.x/7.x

[Raul_Carbonari]

There is a GUI migration plan based on FLASH for other technologies such as HTML5 before the end of support by Adobe and most browsers in Dec / 2020. Or we will suffer the same type of nightmare that exists with JAVA-based GUIs that were never updated again.

[Tomasz]

Hi Tcheurby,

I believe if you asked local SEs it might be possible to get some roadmap details.

GUI change is going to be rather a single shot instead of a process and I don’t even consider such a big company to not take care of such a fundamental issue. Still 5 months to go, let’s give them some more time. 😉 Extreme has put itself under a huge stress with all recent acquisitions and a challenge to squeeze the best juice out of every single acquired thing and drive the evolution of market/tech strategy. I’d love to have HTML5 sooner but seems they focused on other tasks first. And OTOH, it could be looking as it looks now even with HTML5. 😉 BTW I’ve seen couple of VMware servers that had an upgrade to migrate from Flash very recently (I mean the production servers, not update release date).

Cheers,

Tomasz

[tcheurby]

Hi guys, 

Thank you for your answers, I completely agree with you Tomasz. Luckily CLI is great and very powerful so if the client is not allergic it is a joy to work in CLI.  Most of the time, I don't even present the GUI of the VX and I try to sell a Nsight for infrastructure monitoring.

What scares me the most is that all my customers who will have their browser up to date will not be able to access their GUI in January 2021. 

So I have to prepare my migrations for the customers

We are 5 months away from the deadline and nothing is done yet... How to prepare all this? 
As a WING solution integrator we have more than a hundred different customers (small site in VC mode or multi-site) equipped with WING. How to do in such a short time? If in addition the APs need to be changed for the evolution it will be very very short.

The most frustrating thing is that the announcement of the end of flash support by Chrome was published on July 25, 2017: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/
Three years later... no news

Thanks to all of you for giving us some news via this topic.

Cheers,
Tcheurby

[SamPirok]

Hi guys, I can confirm we are still working on switching away from Flash and intend to do so before the cut off date. We don’t have a firm ETA that I can share as of yet, but when we do have some delivery dates set I will do my best to share with you all. Please feel free to check in on this thread, or with me directly at community@extremenetworks.com, for updates. 

[Tomasz]

Hi Tcheurby, Martin,

Agreed, look & feel of WiNG GUI is a bit cringy at first sight, I even had a customer who told me “it’s nice but let’s come back to business when they migrate from Flash”.

One can get used to it after a while, in fact it’s not about how it looks. I think it could have become a bit too hectic when trying to manage and integrate all the stuff together, limited time & money and endless tasks and must-have features to not fall behind with buzzwords ‘n’ stuff (I could even find some plans regarding 8x8 11ax AP: https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/the-ultimate-wi-fi-access-point-which-wi-fi-6-feature... but better not treat this doc seriously). Non-technical customer representatives may often compare features from the datasheet and I suspect that’s one of the driving factors rather than look & feel. But with Flash it’s not only a look & feel issue (and these darn refresh = relogin thing), it’s also about security and it would be nice to see care is taken before an ultimate deadline given by browser developers.

Hoping they are on the right track with migrating from flash-based UI, in the meantime I’d focus on CLI-based demonstrations, this is what allows to see full efficiency, speed and beauty of flexible configuration model, site-wide packet captures and so on.

Cheers,

Tomasz

[Martin8052]

I can understand you very well, we are using Wing at our customers since the beginning with Version 3. And after seeing ECA/ECC or XIQ, I think both are more about monitoring and NAC, also the support of AP7xxx/Ap8xxx in ECC is very short lived, in the new Version 5 the support is totally dropped and in the last 4.x release the support is just grandfathered in, so nothing for new deployments.

And of course, neither ECC or XIQ has build in anything about the strong “MINT Magic” and what is possible with it after you have managed to understand it 🙂

Martin