Software Upgrades
Under the terms and conditions of a support agreement, suppliers regularly provide interim software releases to resolve problems raised by any of its customers and eradicate 'bugs' found during investigation of those problems. These interim software releases are called 'patches' and are often numerous, particularly if a new module has recently been introduced or the system is immature and, consequently, not as robust as a fully developed product. Suppliers often request customers to install patches soon after they have been released, and this can be particularly annoying because it demands very careful version control, is not always an easy or inexpensive exercise and the patches do not necessarily cover the parts of the software that the institution is using.
Suppliers also regularly provide new versions of the software under the same agreement. These versions are called 'upgrades' and these contain both 'bug fixes' and enhancements to improve or extend the functionality of the system. Suppliers usually dictate that upgrades must be installed within 6 or 12 months of their release along with all patches previously issued since the last upgrade. The education organisation can choose to upgrade the software at its own, not inconsiderable, expense or the supplier will install it on behalf of the institution if requested to do so, but will charge for the service.
Whilst upgrades do provide up-to-date, enhanced and more robust software, they can prove to be very costly exercises because they require careful installation, thorough testing, detailed research to understand changes in functionality and potentially significant re-training where changes affect business processes. They may also require additional hardware facilities if the organisation was previously working at full capacity.
It must also be realised that an upgrade to one of a supplier's systems that the organisation is not using may affect another one that it is using if it is integrated in some way, thereby requiring the institution to carry out some aspects of the upgrade (e.g. an upgrade affecting student fees within the Student Record system may require an upgrade to the Accounts Receivable module within the Finance system).
Your organisation may consider not upgrading to the latest version of the software in order to reduce costs. It is common however for suppliers to demand that customers operate the latest or immediately previous version so that they can keep the costs of their support facilities to a minimum. If an organisation refuses to upgrade, the supplier is likely to no longer support the software or worse still invalidate the institution's licence to use the system. Consequently, your organisation may find it sensible to ensure that additional funding and resources are in place, or at least earmarked, to effect system upgrades when necessary.
From time to time, suppliers also provide major new releases of the software that typically reflect major changes in the technology on which the software is based (e.g. most major releases of software in recent years have been Internet-enabled systems that contain web-based applications such as e-procurement, e-business and e-learning capabilities). Thankfully, these major releases only appear every few years and, because they are not always provided under the same support agreement, suppliers do not insist that their customers install them, but they may charge heavily for their advanced system if a customer wishes to implement one. Nevertheless, there is a temptation for a customer to install the software in order to benefit from the latest technology.
