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Overview
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Product Life Cycle
Key
- see Product Maintenance, see Version Support
- General Availability
- The General Availability release is the first release with a given major or minor version number, i.e. version 1.7.0 which replaces version 1.6.x.
- On-going maintenance releases for major / minor versions are counted as 1.7.1, 1.7.2, 1.7.3 etc.. From version 1.7.0 onwards, and in contrast with practice up to and including version 1.6.x, maintenance releases will not contain improvements or new features but will be restricted to bug-fixes, ensuring compatibility of the release to its predecessor as closely as possible.
- End of Maintenance Announcement
- SOS announces the date of the Last Public Maintenance Release approx. 6 months in advance.
- Last Public Maintenance Release
- This date marks the end of Product Maintenance for a release. After this date bug-fixes will only be provided to customers who subscribe to Version Support.
- End of Life
- Bug-fixes for a release will not be provided after this date.
- End of Life may also be triggered when the operating system which the product is running on is no longer supported by the original manufacturer.
- Customers with an on-going support contract can benefit from 1st and 2nd level support (root cause analysis, configuration issues etc.). However, no 3rd level support (code modifications) will be provided.
Product Maintenance Services
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Product Maintenance is a service for all customers that provides bug-fixes starting from the General Availability date up to the Last Public Maintenance Release.
- Target Audience
- SOS provides this service to all customers with a support contract.
- Scope
- Product Maintenance provides customers with releases after the General Availability date up to the end of the Maintenance Period.
- Should a critical error be detected in a release during its Maintenance Period then SOS would fix that bug in a way that does not require complete testing of the release. Testing could be reduced to the bug-fix, instead of a full test of the scheduling environment. In such cases SOS would apply the bug-fix to the latest minor version of that release, e.g. 1.7.3.
- Charging Model
- Product Maintenance is covered by the "Standard Support" and "24/7 Support" options for customers of commercial licenses.
Defect Support
- Analysis and Resolution of Product and Documentation Defects
- Workarounds are communicated if applicable
Build and Installation Support
- Support for customers to build binaries from source code.
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Version Support is a service for enterprise customers that provides bug-fixes after the date of the Last Public Maintenance Release up to the End of Life.
- Target Audience
- SOS provides this service to customers who run SOS products in a stable production environment.
- SOS is aware of the fact that companies with large data centres and proven IT processes for change management would not necessarily adhere to the well-known open source paradigm, "release early, release often". Instead, such companies often operate with product release cycles that are as long as possible - which can translate to, "as long as it doesn't break".
- Scope
- Version Support provides enterprise customers with bug-fixes after the end of the Maintenance Period up to the End Of Life.
- Version Support maintains source code for all components for the Last Public Maintenance Release incl. set-up procedures up to the End of Life.
- Should a critical error be detected in a Last Public Maintenance Release then SOS would fix that bug in a way that does not require complete testing of the release. Testing could be reduced to the bug-fix, instead of a full test of the scheduling environment. In such cases SOS would apply the bug-fix to the latest minor version of that release.
- Charging model
- Such an individual service requires substantial effort and time from our side. We ask our customers to subscribe to this service in addition to Product Maintenance.
- We charge for this service according to the effort required. A three day effort for fixing bugs, building a patch or new release, perform testing and deploying the patch or release to the customer is a good estimate. This effort will be charged in addition to the Product Maintenance fee. Our goal is to keep maintenance fees for customers with standard requirements as low as possible and to provide such additional services to enterprise customers should the need arise
New Releases
- Access to new features and components that become available.
- Support for system environment updates (operating system, DBMS).