I’ve been using The Gateway as a vehicle to keep S4 partners and users of the S4 Open Appliances updated as we recovered from the unexpected discontinuation of Advantech’s UNO 2059GL hardware platform. In this article, I’m focusing on the future.
Release 1.50 goes back to the future. That is, we have created a Windows CE 5.0 image for the Advantech UNO 2362G hardware platform. Windows CE 5.0 was the OS hosting our S4 Open Appliances from their inception through our 1.30 release. Historically, we purchased the UNO 2059GL platforms with Windows CE 5.0 pre-installed, then added our firmware. In the eight+ years of delivering release 1.30 and its predecessors there has never been a breach of system integrity or security. By creating our own Windows CE 5.0 image, we now have complete control over the system configuration and can further tighten the security of the system by only allowing communications to well-known and trusted services that we white list.
The initial tests of Windows CE running on the 2362G hardware were conducted last week and are producing good results. Our converged 1.50 firmware will run in this environment. This restores all functionality of our 1.30 release and includes all 1.30 and 1.40 enhancements and bug fixes. Plus, the added benefit of a larger memory footprint and more powerful CPU of the UNO 2362G platform. Q/A testing and regression testing of the firmware will start within the next week and should not take long at all to complete. At that point, all new orders will be filled with our 1.50 release. Partners on our 1.30 and 1.40 releases covered under our Software Assurance program can migrate to 1.50 as part of their subscription benefits.
Release 2.0 is under development and will be hosted on an S4 designed platform that is custom manufactured for S4. All of our upcoming integrations will be developed for this environment. Our plans are to have the first new integrations in alpha test later this summer.