In January 2017 ShoreTel announced End-of-Sale (EoS) and End-of-Life (EoL)  for various hardware and software. The highlights from the announcements were the EoL for all “Full Width” appliances, the EoL for the 14.2 software, and the EoS of the “Half Width” appliances. These were to happen on 12/31/18, 6/30/18 and 6/30/18 respectively. In the middle of these dates, Mitel acquired ShoreTel. In May of 2019 Mitel issued a new revised EoS/EoL schedule: 

In January of 2017 ShoreTel made several EoS (End of Sale) and EoL (End of Life) announcements. The announcements were for multiple hardware and software products.  The hardware products coming to EoL have been in EoS for more than 6 years.  ShoreTel’s track record of asking their clients to upgrade hardware has been incredible. The last EoL product from ShoreTel occurred more than 10 years ago, with ShoreTel’s original “Blue Appliances.”  Because most clients have never gone through this with ShoreTel, there is still a lot of confusion about exactly what this means and how to address it properly. The easiest way to begin dissecting this is to refer to this chart provided by ShoreTel:

IT administrators can generally always agree on one thing: dealing with carriers for their multi-site connectivity sucks! This connectivity normally comes in the form of a MPLS Private IP cloud, EPL, EVPL, VPLS, etc….  At this point in time it feels like so many carriers just make up new acronyms to try and make their service sound flashier. The industry consensus is that ordering new circuits takes forever and submitting trouble tickets is pretty much a “hurry up and wait” game. To receive SLA credits is near impossible, requiring you to use their own systems to prove they are incompetent. These are just the normal complaints about interacting with the carriers, when you start talking about how much money you send them every month...wow...just wow.