Incremental Updates Are the Ticket

Have you ever implemented the newest and shiniest updates for a piece of software only to find out that something you relied on no longer functions properly or has disappeared without warning? If you have, you are not alone.

Here at Zuercher Technologies, we understand that our clients deal with constant change. We also understand that an agency’s public safety software must continue to work day in and day out without major disruptions.

How do we minimize the disruptions when we update ledsSuite? We start by grouping our updates into two broad categories: minor and major. Minor updates are just that: adjustments and tweaks to the system that are often not noticeable except to the one person who reported an issue or noticed that something was not exactly as it should be. Major updates include substantial new functionality and are scheduled and deployed 3 to 4 times per year.

Minor updates may be sent out at any time and are implemented within ledsSuite via a process that is transparent to the user. When a user logs out of ledsSuite and then logs back in, the system checks for any available updates and applies them before completing the log in process.

With major updates, we coordinate closely with the agency because of the potential for disruption. To minimize potential issues, we first deploy the updates to the agency’s training servers. At this point, agency personnel work with the new software in the training environment to get familiar with the changes. Once the release has been tested within the agency’s environment, the major updates are applied to each user’s computer via the same push update process used for minor updates.

After the updates users are presented with an application which looks and feels like the one they had before the update, but allows them to do their jobs more efficiently and easily than before.

The best part about our updates? Minor and major updates are included in our comprehensive maintenance agreement at no additional charge to our clients—and that’s perhaps the least disruptive thing of all.