Is automatic upgrade a realistic feature expected from enterprise web applications?

Question

Most of my work is related to what can be considered corporate web applications. These projects have large budgets, longer periods (from 3 to 12 months) and heavy settings. Since we touted the idea of ​​the Internet as the next desktop OS as developers, customers expect software running on this “new OS” to respond the same way they do on the desktop. This includes easy-to-manage automatic updates. In other words, "Update is available. Do you want to update?" Is this even a real expectation? Can anyone speak from experience about trying to implement this feature?

Answer 1

In my company we have corporate installations for thousands of places. If we implemented automatic updates, our customers would rebel!

Large installations have special problems that do not apply to small ones. For example, with 2000 users (not all of whom are, say, the most sophisticated users of tools), learning tools is a big deal: training time, internal demos, internal process documents, etc. They cannot unleash a new function or change the user interface without the ability to understand how it fits in their process and, therefore, what are their internal best practices and how to communicate this to their users.

Also, when applications fail, it is the responsible internal IT team. Therefore, they need time to install the new version in the test area, beating and deploying on Saturday only when they are good and ready.

I can see how to make small patches easier to install, especially when the patch is intended only for fixing bugs, and not for something that will require retraining, and if admins will still finally say when they are installed. But even then I do not believe that anyone has ever asked for it! Regardless of whether they want it or they are trained not to expect it, it does not look like this.

Answer 2

Well, it really depends on your business model, but for many applications, the SaaS model may end up biting you. This is great for a lot of things, but for some larger applications, users don’t invest so much and maybe go for something else before you make any money.

Cm.

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-218408.html

and here

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/21/SoftwareAsAServiceWhenYourBusinessModelBecomesAParadox.aspx

for more information

Answer 3

One of the main reasons for implementing the application as a web application is that you receive automatic updates for free. Why will users be prompted to update the web application?

In Windows applications, the update is “available, do you want to update”? the functionality is provided by Microsoft using ClickOnce, which I have used successfully in the corporate environment - there are several fixes, but for the most part this is a good way to manage the automatic deployment and updating of Windows applications.

For mobile applications, you can also implement automatic updates, although this is a bit more complicated.

In any case, in order to answer your question in a broad sense, I don’t know if all corporate applications are expected to simplify the upgrade, but it certainly costs money in terms of IT support to make it easy to upgrade architectures.

Answer 4

If you provide a hosted solution, I would not bother. Let the update happen quietly (perhaps with a notification that you did this). If you are selling an application hosted on your servers, let the upgrade decision be made by one owner, and not by each user of the application.