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Frontline will not accept customer-written warranties of Y2K compliance, attached to purchase orders or the like. Such provisions effectively impose a formal warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose; we simply cannot administer a different, customer-written warranty on every new order.

We recommend our annual software maintenance program to customers concerned about Y2K compliance or any other software maintenance issue, such as future compatibility with operating system and spreadsheet changes, new features, bug fixes, and technical support.

Our Y2K testing: Even though our software products do not manipulate dates in any way, in response to various customer inquiries, we have performed simple tests in which we run our software products on a PC as it transitions from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000; we have observed no problems of any kind. We have performed similar tests on the free, time-limited evaluation versions of certain products mentioned below, and have observed no problems of any kind.

User conventions for dates: All of the above products accept as inputs numeric values which are determined by the user, whether as values in spreadsheet cells, or as arguments passed to the Solver DLL products. The user may have some method or convention for interpreting such numeric values as dates – and this method or convention may or may not be Y2K compliant. This, however, is a user issue which is outside the scope of our products.

Spreadsheet facilities for dates: Both Microsoft Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 have methods or conventions for interpreting numeric values as dates. It is possible (though not very common) for users to utilize such numeric values in spreadsheet models which are then optimized by our Solvers. However, to our Solvers, these are just numeric values which may be compared, added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, etc.; they have no significance as dates. Users who utilize these spreadsheet facilities for representing and manipulating dates should consult Microsoft or Lotus regarding the Y2K compliance of these facilities. In our view, modern spreadsheet facilities for manipulating dates, when used correctly (e.g. by entering 4-digit years) are Y2K compliant, but we cannot make any formal statement about these spreadsheet products offered by other vendors.

Time-limited evaluation versions: Frontline Systems offers free evaluation versions of certain products, such as the Premium Solver Plus, which are designed to function for a limited number of days or until a certain date. The licensing code in these evaluation versions (which is not used in the standard commercial versions) does manipulate dates. This is done in a fully Y2K-compliant way, using standard Win32 facilities for handling system dates and times. Although in our own testing we have never observed any such problems, we note that if the transition to the Year 2000 caused a PC’s system date to be incorrect due to hardware or BIOS problems, this might cause a free evaluation version to report an expired license and stop functioning; however, this situation would not affect the "full license" version of the same product in any way.

Obsolete products: A few customers have inquired about the Year 2000 compliance of software products which once were offered by Frontline Systems, but which were discontinued many years ago (typically around 1992 to 1994). Users must realize that these products are obsolete, and the spreadsheets for which they were designed (such as Lotus 1-2-3 Release 2) are also obsolete, in our judgment. We certainly cannot make any statements about the Y2K compliance of these products. They include:

Questions and comments: Frontline Systems welcomes your questions and comments on this Year 2000 Readiness Disclosure. Please contact us by phone at 775-831-0300, by fax at 775-831-0314, or by email at info@frontsys.com. Thank you.