The weConnect production system gets upgrades every few months. We strive to make the upgrade process as smooth as possible. There are two aspects to a system upgrade: we can upgrade the cloud side as well as the display nodes (hardware) firmware. Some updates require both, but not always. Barco follows the semantic versioning specification v2.0.0.
We strive to have an open and transparent communication towards our customers; this means that we send information to administrators of institutes in advance on what the upgrade will entail and when we will start the upgrade process. When possible, we offer options to the community of scheduling certain updates to moments where it does not have a big operational impact on the day to day business. We strive to give our community of users at least 14 calendar days of advance warning before upgrades are triggered. During the upgrade process we monitor all the institutes proactively. The weConnect system does not allow us to run different versions for different customers, but we do recognize that not everyone is able to internally process and manage all the new features we bring out during a term or school year. Therefore our system allows administrators to hide new features until the staff and students are properly prepared for it. Lastly, upgrades are scheduled to happen outside normal business hours in order to minimize service disruption. A typical cloud upgrade only impacts the system for about 15 minutes. Most firmware upgrades for display nodes are not critical and therefore will happen at night when no lectures are ongoing or scheduled for a couple of hours.
Please check our Service Level Agreement (SLA) documentation for detailed information on our service guarantees.
- Patches
- Patches typically fix or improve system functionality. As some fixes have a big impact on the customer experience, we sometimes have a short time between announcements and application of the patch.
- The cloud business logic and database might be upgraded.
- The firmware of the devices might be upgraded.
- Minor version upgrades
- These releases introduce new features, usability and serviceability improvements.
- The cloud business logic and database will be upgraded.
- The firmware of the devices might be upgraded.
- Major version upgrades
- Major upgrades introduce major new system capabilities and offerings to the community.
These upgrades happen in two distinct steps. First the cloud business logic and database will be upgraded. Then the display nodes will upgrade automatically. In a major upgrade the communication between the cloud and display nodes changes significantly. This means that display nodes might be forced to upgrade immediately to be able to connect to the new cloud.
