Welcome to my blog and thank you for your interest! This is Daniel Ortega and I am the Head of Operations at Basecone. I’d like take a couple of minutes to tell you about the way we do our Software Releases. Why? Because we’ve received a good amount of queries from customers about this topic.
In the months before October, we released quite a lot of software updates. While they were all crucial for improving your Basecone experience, people started to wonder why… Why that many? Some users even got a bit worried; so many updates must mean there’s something wrong, right?
Wrong! 🙂
Besides improving Basecone as a product, by adding features or making existing features smarter, Basecone’s backbone – our servers – needs to stay in excellent condition as well. And our hosting environment is in fact expanding rapidly, so that we can optimize our performance. We are committed to give you the best end user experience and as a consequence we need to keep an eye on our servers, making sure they run smoothly and contain the most up-to-date software. This means we frequently need to take some time to not only release new product functionalities and improvements, but also update the servers. And this sometimes has an impact on you, the user.
But that should be nothing new for you… Just think about applications on your computer, like Windows, or apps on your smartphone: sometimes they ask you to close it and open it again to enjoy new functionalities. The same goes for Basecone.
But because we want the impact on you to be as little as possible, and because we want to be fully available for you on the day after the release (in the unlikely event something went wrong), we’ve decided to release new software on a Thursday night, after 11 PM (CET). And the plan is to do this every other Thursday, starting on November 10th. This means every other Friday, when you start up Basecone, you’ll be enjoying new software, that sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t contain improvements you’ll be able to notice. But without an exception it is software that’s been designed to make your life with Basecone easier.
And don’t worry, your information is protected at all times. That’s why we always kindly ask everyone to log out before the moment of release, through a banner we put up in Basecone, on the day of the release. Just to be 100% sure.
Which brings me to the topic of communication around releases. Our new and improved status page and our Twitter accounts (@Basecone and @Basecone_uk) will be the standard channels through which we will inform you about upcoming updates and maintenance windows. And if you do want to be informed through email as well, you can subscribe to our dedicated release newsletter. Just go to our release information page and enter your email address.
I hope I’ve been able to reassure you a bit: we are updating our software on a regular basis to keep our back-end systems healthy and to offer you the latest and greatest Basecone application. I guarantee you: Basecone’s Improvement Fridays will become days you’re looking forward to!
Daniel Ortega
Operations Manager (2016)
