Do releases and upgrades require system outages?
For the most part, application version upgrades are performed with no application downtime. If changes do require downtime, the below terms from our SLA prevail:
Scheduled
Ento requires from time to time the ability to perform maintenance on the network. Ento will provide notification via email (to the super manager contacts defined in the manager area of your account), to the following schedule:
| Category | Notice | Duration | Period |
| Consultative | As agreed | As agreed | As agreed |
| Planned | 5 business days | < 30 minutes | 10:00pm – 5:00am (AEST) |
| Unplanned | 24 hours | < 10 minutes | 10:00pm – 5:00am (AEST) |
| Emergency | – | < 5 minutes | 10:00pm – 5:00am (AEST) |
Non-scheduled
Non-scheduled outages will be communicated ASAP after the outage begins. Because Ento uses a third-party for customer communication, there is an extremely low possibility that a non-scheduled outage of Ento will affect our ability to deliver such communications.
What is Ento’s application version upgrade schedule? (weekly, monthly quarterly)
An overview of our release management process can be found below. We don’t follow a strict weekly or monthly release schedule at Ento. Instead, in line with modern agile product development methodologies, we elect to release frequent, incremental packages on a feature by feature basis. This ensures a constant stream of product improvements while dramatically decreasing risk.
Changes are broken into three categories:
- Customer facing – low impact, e.g. UI tweaks & refinement
- Customer facing – high impact, e.g. new functionality, navigation restructures
- Non-customer facing, e.g. bug fixes, code optimisations
Customer facing – minimal impact
Generally, changes in this category are made without notification unless they form part of a wider release containing ‘customer facing – high impact’ changes.
Customer facing – high impact
Most new features that will materially affect functionality are released as ‘default off’, i.e. they need to be opted into by the customer. Once released, communication will be sent to customers with details of the new feature, links to relevant support guides, and instructions for activating the functionality. Account managers will work with Enterprise clients directly around major new functionality.
Non-customer facing
Similarly, to the ‘customer facing – low impact’ changes, these will be deployed without notification unless part of a wider release.