I know there has been a lot of talk about GSS 3.0 being cancelled
Actually, there's been almost none, given that it's been cancelled since early 2009 and it's 2012 now.
The *fact* is that no-one in senior management has cared one iota about Ghost since John Thompson took over from Gordon Eubanks and refocused Symantec around security. Our VP in the days of Ghost Enterprise 7.0 and 7.5 fought hard with the executive team to get any funding or recognition for the product, even though Ghost was contributing about 20% of Symantec's *entire* revenue at that time.
The next thing that happened was that Ghost was cancelled in 2004 after Symantec acquired PowerQuest and On (who had a product called iCommand that was supposed to replace Ghost Enterprise just as DS was supposed to after the Altiris acquisition).
Then in 2006, with the Veritas merger, senior VP Jeremy Burton (who later left to become a CEO of another company) uncanceled Ghost, and we then produced GSS 2.0 and GSS 2.5; with Jeremy gone, once again we had no management support and so when control passed to yet another VP who neither knew nor cared about Ghost, it was cancelled for a second time in 2009, this time with the staff laid off and the site closed so we couldn't bring it back.
Hoping that Symantec hasn't given up the Ghost.
Fun fact: out of the last 10 years, Ghost hasn't been in active development for roughly 5 of those years. The last original staff member from Binary Research to work at Symantec was me - I designed and wrote most of the GSS management platform, in conjunction with Slawek Kajetanowicz who took care of the console GUI and database design.
Seriously, if Symantec's senior management actually wanted to be a serious competitor in the systems management business, the VPs wouldn't have done something as monumentally stupid as lay off *all* the staff responsible for such a well-known and highly-regarded product and simply cease development for several years.
Everything you need to know about the supposed fact they are looking at a new release is due to these simple words: "Windows 8". Expect a version-number bump to occur at the end of the year when Windows 8 ships, and not much else happening thereafter. What we got told when the layoffs hit was that if revenue dropped they'd do the minimum required to stop it declining too rapidly, and that's all this is.
Basically there is no real engineering work required in GSS to support Windows 8, so the most likely things that a GSS refresh release will contain are just:
- a few additional inventory filters which are cut-and-pastes of the "Windows 7" ones saying "Windows 8"
- replacing the original Windows PE 2.0 distribution included in the product with a newer one with bundled drivers to update the old collection from 2008 which is still in the product.
The last thing is the only thing that matters; although it adds no functionality to the product it matters hugely for supportability. Anything else that gets brought over from the code already developed by the original team members (including the PXE server I wrote in 2010 which is part of the GSS source tree) is basically gravy, but the fact of the matter is that you can't just "uncancel" a product and add developers to it from a standing start, so it's entirely possible that Win8 plus a WinPE refresh will be all that can be added at the microscopic level of investment Symantec is currently making (not that it has ever put much into Ghost; if you are familiar with Symantec's SEC filings you know roughly what the portfolio-wide level of R&D investment as a percentage of revenue is - Ghost got no more than a third of that, and then taking into account the years it was cancelled the product's lifetime average R&D investment was even lower).