TERMINALFOUR Upgrades
Upgrades, both major and minor are included within the TERMINALFOUR support agreement.
Upgrades are usually carried out by TERMINALFOUR staff remotely on client systems. If desired, clients may elect to carry out upgrades themselves. Clients are notified about releases in advance. Before any installations or upgrades, an installation schedule is agreed to give you plenty of notice. All Major, Minor and Build releases are documented on the customer Extranet in the product area.
Deploying a new upgrade does not involve any downtime of the website. A new WAR application file is simply deployed to the CMS server and the system will automatically go into upgrade mode. You will then be brought through a wizard which will check the system state (for any issues) and then update the applications. Once your upgrade is complete, automated tests are conducted to confirm it was a success.
The whole upgrade process is completely automated. Custom developments to TERMINALFOUR using the application API or bespoke elements are managed separately at upgrade time. These custom developments are stored in a specific location and are referenced in the TERMINALFOUR database. At upgrade time this location is ignored by the upgrader. This means any upgrade has no impact on bespoke developments.