1. Upgrading from 6.9? No way! At least not until something better comes along, and 7.5 is not it. Too many features missing that we need and have become accustomed to using. We had Client Management Suite since v5, upgraded to 5.5 to v6 to v6.5, but the only thing we really used it for was configuring the BIOS. That feature was removed in v7.1, so we quit using that altogether. Having Client Management Suite v7.1 and Asset Managment Suite v7.1 on the same server tied Licensing to Software Deployment, which was a nightmare for deploying software.
Waking up the agent to deploy software was problematic, even in v7.1, so we never used it for that. We had a couple of tasks setup to run whenever they became relevant again, but they didn't always work properly.
v6.9 doesn't have all these problems, so supported or not, I don't care. EOL or not, I don't care. As long as I can still run 6.9, and it can still deploy images and software, that's what I'll be using.
2. We were using Asset Management Suite v6, and we made the mistake of upgrading to 7.1. That has fallen by the wayside.
Symantec has taken easy to use and configure products (Client Management Suite and Asset Management Suite v6) and made them way too complicated and difficult to use. I'm not a developer, and have no desire to become one. Could I do it? Yes. Do I want to? No. I can do fairly complicated SQL queries, and that helped with v6 reporting and filtering computers. We're looking for something else.
My two cents worth on webapps:
Web-based apps in general just flat out suck. Most of them are unreliable and are poorly programmed. SaaS was a bust because of it. Now we call it the "Cloud", and suddenly it's alright? Java programming sucks. A lot of Java apps are tied to a specific version of Java, and a newer, more secure, version of Java seems to come out every other month, so you're stuck with security vulnerabilities because you're tied to a particular version of Java. I can't tell you how many apps broke in our Organization because Java got upgraded.
Adobe Flash, SIlverlight? Same thing. Updates break apps because developers tend to write to those areas that are vulnerable, or they write to features that the vendor removes in the next version. Whether interntionally or not, it doesn't matter. It still breaks the app, and you're stuck either with a vulnerability or an older version.
All of that doesn't take into account versions of browsers. Webapps tend to be dependant on certain features of certain browsers. It becomes a nightmare when one webapp requires v7 of IT and another requires v8. I know. Compatibility mode. Try explaining that to users that just want to run their apps.
I long for the good ole days of Win32 apps that didn't break every time the OS was patched. I know. Some did, and some still do. But most Win32 apps I installed were programmed properly, using proper error checking, and the errors were usually meaningful to a Systems Engineer. Webapps? Forget it! You almost never get anything meaningful out of an error message. You rarely know if the error comes from the browser, Flash, Silverlight, Java, ActiveX, VBScript, JavaScript, .NET, or the OS.
Dont get me wrong, there are a few decent webapps out there - just not that many.