Microsoft Corp says that out of 1,681 of its products it has tested for Y2K compliance, 93% pass the muster or have only minor issues. The 7% are all older products, it says. It has 150 or so more left on its active price list still to test and is now offering new tools and plug-ins for customers to test their own Microsoft code. It is to begin supplying a Y2K product analyzer, which scans Microsoft code on a hard disk, a Y2K resource CD and three Excel Y2K plug-ins for migrating date information, fixing dates and watching the application for ambiguous formats. The forthcoming 2.0 cut of Systems Management Server also includes Y2K analysis and correction facilities. The testing tools do work against FoxPro or Visual FoxPro, the products over which Microsoft faces a Y2K class actin lawsuit (CI No 3,566). The products are potentially incapable of accurately processing dates beyond December 31, 1999, according to Chicago law firm Gold & Rosenfeld, and Massachusetts law firm Gogel, Phillips and Garcia LLP. Microsoft maintains that the only problem with both is with two-digit dates that will interpret 2029 as 1929. However Microsoft doesn’t yet appear to be getting Y2K-proofed software out of the door. It says its policy is that future products will be year 2000 compliant, and adds that to support customers who use versions of Microsoft products that are recent but not the most current, it will maintain the year 2000 compliance of many popular products through Jan 1 2001, even if newer products become available. It’s a fairly limited concept of Y2K compliance. The British Standards Institute, for example, says that Year 2000 conformity shall mean that neither performance nor functionality is affected by dates prior to, during and after the year 2000.
