Postby florian » Tue Nov 13, 2007 1:58 am
Hi Graeme,
not really weird.... you have a valid software subscription, which entitles you to use all new versions and updates of Scalix, as they are released. This would include major and minor releases as well as patch releases, basically everything that happens in the first three version number components (i.e. as of today, 12.x would be considered the next major, 11.3 the next minor or 11.2.1 the next patch release).
It would actually also cover general hotfixes, which we rarely publish, basically only in case of security issues - believe it's more than a year that we did the last one of those.
In every case something is released for you, you'll be notificed by email as well.
Given that we normally do 3 releases per year, this offers good value for the subscription. This year we've actually done more releaes, as we wanted to resolve a couple of Scalix 11 issues as quickly as possible - with 11.0.1, 11.0.2, 11.0.3, 11.0.4, 11.1 and 11.2 you already received 6 minor and patch releases and with 11.3 planned for December you'll receive one more - the latter 3 also providing new functionality. We're planning for 3 releases, 2 minor and 1 major, next year - if some of our plans materialize, Scalix will look a verydifferent product at the end of 2008. Stay tuned.
However, there is also a 2nd dimension to our offerings, and that's support. We offer support in two flavours, one is incident-based (buy a certain number of incidents, valid for a year) and called standard support, the second is yearly (with a cap of incidents and other addon services like training, system checkup) and is called premium support. Either way, with purchasing incidents or a yearly contract, you create what we call an active support contract. The main purpose of this is obviously that you can log a case with Scalix Tech Support as needed and we'll help you getting back on your feet within your SLA.
Once in a while we actually offer some benefit to our customers with active support contracts, to increase the value of having one of those around, beyond what the normal subscription offers. One way to do that is to offer early access to product improvements that are non-critical. This is the perfect example - the patch package (not a release as per the above definition, the change is from SWA - and only SWA - 11.2.0.52 to 11.2.0.58) - does not fix any critical or non-critical bugs - it only improves load time for login and initial windows. The change is available for all customers under subscription in 11.3, the ones with active support agreements can get early access to the build as an extra goodie. If it had been a critial issue that we wanted to resolve as early as possible, you can rest assured that we would have published it to the whole group of customers under subscription.
This is really a case by case decision, and in this case one that I took myself. I hope the policy as described above makes sense to you, even if you're not the most positively affected by it.
Cheers,
Florian.
P.S. By the way, just to be clear, *if* you have a support agreement in place and request the patch, *no* incident from your balance is subtracted - the fact that a valid contract exists is good enough for this one.
S
Florian von Kurnatowski, Die Harder!