When should you upgrade your software?

Over the weekend, a friend asked me what I think about MacOSX Lion (he knows we are a Mac-only shop). My answer surprised him: We have not even begun to evaluate it.

I took the opportunity to run him through our upgrade policy, which can be depicted nicely as an infographic:

 

Essentially, our Macs fall into three categories:

• Production Critical Systems, where we do all the heavy lifting for our clients. If these systems don't work, we not only face missed milestones, but probably some very serious time rebuilding the machines. Thus, we are most carefully when upgrading these.
• Production Systems, for tasks such as writing, emailing or billing. While essential, we can easily switch these tasks to other hardware, with only minor (or no) impact on milestones.
• Test Systems, which is hardware that is not in daily use and can therefore be used to test before we deploy in our production environment.

In an environment like this, OS upgrades are the hardest to pull off. During a brief stint in the data center world, I learned that you should never upgrade the OS of critical systems until at least 6 months after the upgrade was released. Similarly, we don't even touch a new OS until the first maintenance release and don't put it in production until the second maintenance release. In other words, let others find and worry about bugs.

In the case of OSX 10.7 Lion, we felt that the first maintenance release was so small, that we would wait for the second maintenance release before starting to test. Also, we aren't in dire need for any of the new features, so if in doubt, we'd rather sit it out a bit longer than jump in too early.

That's why we have not even begun testing Lion.

 

Sequentia Environics featured in Gartner's Digital Marketing Service Providers report

 

One of our customers, Sequentia Environics, were distinguished in Gartner’s Competitive Landscape: Digital Marketing Service Providers report. Joining the ranks of McKinsey & Co. and Accenture, they are the only firm noted for social community development to support activities such as advocacy marketing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, consulting and measurement.

Congratulations to well-deserved recognition!

Screenflow 3 released

Screenflow from Telestream is our favorite editor for Corporate Demo Versions. They just released version 3 of the software and were kind enough to include the following quote by us in their press release.
"ScreenFlow 3 provides huge productivity improvements for us," said Veit Irtenkauf, CEO and co-founder of Digital Dazzle, LLC. "In the past, we had to use third-party tools to highlight specific regions of the screen, blur sensitive information and draw freehand video annotations. With ScreenFlow 3, we can now do these directly inside the video editor, which speeds up our video editing workflow and allows us to turn around customer change-requests more quickly. ScreenFlow remains our editor-of-choice for our corporate video services."