For those clients who have been with us for quite some time you are probably used to the familiar quarterly releases we typically do 4 times a year.  Some of these quarterly release focus on major functionality roll outs while others are more platform improvement driven.  I just wanted to post a quick note to let you all know that we will not be performing our typical Q3 or Q4 release this year.  That's not to say we won't be releasing enhancements, fixes and other updates throughout the rest of the year.  We've simply changed our release schedule to better accommodate the current needs of the platform.  So, please feel free to continue to post feature requests and share your suggestions.  These will still be taken into consideration as we continue to enhance the platform.

What has changed?

Through the end of the year we will be pushing both weekly revision releases and monthly minor releases.  Revision releases will be very low impact and will always be pushed on Tuesday.  Minor releases are low to medium impact (read: potential downtime, but very limited if so) and are scheduled for the second Tuesday of each remaining month.  Release notes will be published in our release announcements blog for these releases.  The next minor release is scheduled for 9/13.  Dates are subject to change, but we will be sure to inform you if that's the case.

Why the change?

Quarterly releases have served us well in the past as we've built our platform to what it is today.  However, we feel that the current, most pressing need is to address platform performance and speed.  Because these enhancements tend to be iterative in nature (e.g. build -> test -> release -> measure improvement -> do it all again) we feel that pushing updates monthly will better serve our goal to improve platform performance quickly. 

How do we find out about enhancements and new features now?

The first place to check is always our release blog, which can be found here: http://community.theport.com/releaseannouncements.  The blog focuses on bug fixes and enhancements to existing functionality that may be of interest to you and your end users.  In addition to the blog each release may be accomodated by production release notes.  We will distribute these as needed depending on the types of functionality that may change in any upcoming release.  Any end user impacting changes will be documented and distributed per our normal process.

Will quarterly releases resume in 2012?

We plan to re-evaluate the need for our major quarterly releases by the end of the year and will inform all users of the go forward plan by early 2012.

Thanks,
ThePort Network Team