3rd try: Certification of Reports 6i for Windows XP

Question

Hello !!!
We have a cust. which is delivering software for small comunities in
Germany. They are handling about 4500 Users and they have 1 Mio. $
licenses in DB and reports.
the problem is: the customer can't upgrade to
reports 9i, because reports is embedded in a client/server application.
They would need some more time to do the upgrade.
Having reports on the web would bring some authentication problems.
The user will authenticate in the client/server application. But the user
shouldn't know the login to the database for the reports.
Portal and SSO Server are no acceptable solutions for the customer,
because this would require an additional oracle database. They are selling
their application to their customer who have databasese like Informix, DB/2
or SQL Server and don't want an additional database. So they can't go this
way. Having a Kay-map File (cgicmd.dat) ist also not acceptable for the
customer, because the username/password would appear there in clear text and
they already decided, that they won't accept this. OS permissions are
no solution, because most of their customers have an insecure Microsoft
Windows environment, even for the server.
So they are in a situation, that they can't upgrade immediately to
Web-Reports and need some more time.
Unfortunately many of their customers
come with XP computers and they would have to say that they have to
downgrade to Windows 2000 or loose this customer.
There have been some rumours about patch 11 for the certification. This
was rejected. Then Patch 12. Anotherone said it willl be Patch 13.
Another rumour stated that development isn't planing this certification anymore.
These statements are only made for Forms6i. Does they apply to reports6i
also ???
We urgently need an official statement for our customers.
If the certification is only in Patch 13 in December we will realize some
million $ looses. This special customer won't accept this very long delay.
Many Thanks ind advance
Rainer

Answer 1

Frank