The not future of SMB1 - another MS engineering quickie survey

Good afternoon/Morning/Evening Ned Pyle

I work in IT for a large engineering company in good old UK. We've over 30 Mazak machines running Win 95, Win 2000 Pro and XP and which rely heavily on SMB1 for data transfer and machine reporting (via Seiki). No sign of the management spending some money to replace these oldies so its up to IT to keep them going. Last year you reported about an executable that would replace SMB1, is this still in the pipeline? We're looking at alternative methods but to be frank there's not a lot of suitable options other than FTP, segregated drives or similar.

I've posted this on other forums over the last year or so in various guises without much success. Comments like "stop using SMB1" are not helpful in a production environment with millions of pounds worth of investment potentially about to hit the dust or fall over majestically using floppy disk file transfer and a bit of sellotape.

thanks

Steve