Alpha releases

[SparkyWalker]

I work for a company that is considering buying SetBuilder Developer to handle our automated software upgrades.

We want to be able to do the following:

(a) perform an alpha release to 5 of our ~50 customer for user acceptance testing
(b) perform hotfix releases to individual customers (i.e. 1 of ~50)

Does SetBuilder allow you to control which customers will receive an upgrade, and if so how? A pointer to any relevant documentation would be really appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Mark

[linder]

Mark,

Do all customers have the same "standard" software or do they have "individual" builds?

Friedrich

[SparkyWalker]

Hi Friedrich,

Normally the customers will all have the same software, but when a new version of the software has completed our internal testing we upgrade several customer sites with the beta software to run beta testing.

The beta testing lasts about a week, we make required bug fixes and enhancements to the application and we then upgrade all customer sites with the new release. At this point all the customer sites are using the same software again.

So every time we do a major release there is a period when 90% of our customers have one version of our software while another 10% have the beta version of the software.

Thanks,
Mark

[linder]

Mark,

Sorry, I forgot to ask the following in my previous message.

> (a) perform an alpha release to 5 of our ~50 customer for user acceptance testing
> (b) perform hotfix releases to individual customers (i.e. 1 of ~50)

Should (a) and/or (b) be handled via "web update" or can it be done with a full install image (that can handle updates)?

Friedrich

[SparkyWalker]

Friedrich,

Once we have everything up and running we intend to manually install our next release with the iDeploy web update capability enabled. Once all of our customer sites are up and running with the web updates, the subsequent software upgrades will be done automatically (using the iDeploy "web update").

At this point I would like to be able to select 5 sites and have the ability to update only those 5 sites. This would allow us to do some beta testing before pushing out all of the software to everyone.

We want to use this cautious approach (a) to ensure our "advisory" customers like the new features before releasing to the entire customer base and (b) to make sure we don't accidentally "take out" all of our customer systems if there is a problem with the installer or a showstopper in our software that we have missed during testing.

Thanks for your advice with this..

Mark

[linder]

Hi Mark,

We'll have to brainstorm this and I'll get back to you within the next 24 hours!

Thanks,
Friedrich

[SparkyWalker]

Thanks for looking into this for me...much appreciated!

[linder]

Sorry for the delay. We are still discussing this topic...

Friedrich