How long will you support the different versions of JobScheduler and JADE?

Product Life Cycle

Key

• Product Maintenance Period, Version Support Period
• General Availability
  • The General Availability release is usually the first release with a given major or minor version number, i.e. version 1.7.0 which replaces version 1.6.x.
  • Ongoing bug-fix 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, bug-fix 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 Life Announcement
  • SOS announces the date of the Last Public Bug-fix Release approx. 6 months in advance.
• Last Public Bug-fix 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 ongoing 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.

Staying informed:

• We make formal announcements in our Product News.
• Note that you can subscribe to our Product News with an RSS feed or follow us on twitter.

Releases

The End of Life for product releases is (as of Aug 2014) as follows:

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Platform Support History

The following table shows the last available release for selected older operating system versions. SOS provides product releases for newer versions.

For a detailed list of supported platforms see the FAQ: Which platforms is JobScheduler available for and what platform support is provided?

Product Maintenance Period

Product Maintenance is a service for all customers that provides bug-fixes starting from the General Availability date up to the Last Public Bug-fix 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.

Version Support Period

Version Support is a service for enterprise customers that provides bug-fixes after the date of the Last Public Bug-fix 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 releases after the end of the Maintenance Period up to the End Of Life.
  • Version Support maintains source code for all components of a Last Public Bug-fix Release incl. set-up procedures up to the End of Life.
  • Should a critical error be detected in a Last Public Bug-fix 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 new release, perform testing and deploying the 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.