Why people should upgrade - and download/upgrade links - Happy SYSADMIN DAY!

Software upgrades are a part of our modern society for a number of reasons.

Security:

This comes first and foremost, leaving software exposed to the internet that is out of date is generally bad. I accept that there are cases where legacy systems still exist because they are no longer supported etc, but these cases are few and far between. Anyone looking after a piece of software really MUST ensure that any security updates are applied! Failure to do so is lazy, and will cause problems further down the line for the person maintaining the system. Worse, it is antisocial, as a compromised system can result in spam being sent out or disruption to other peoples’ systems. Even worse, failure to ensure that security patches are applied can be criminal with the loss of personally identifiable information enabling further social engineering compromises to take place.

Support:

Everyone needs help from time to time. Having your system on the latest version means that what you see when you have a problem, everyone else sees as well. It helps everyone else to help you. Expecting everyone else to have every possible version of suiteCRM to test your setup when needing help and guidance, is not really fair. Also you may find that your problem has already been resolved in the latest versions and that you’re just wasting peoples’ time.

Maintainability:

Apple has a huge advantage with iOS, compare with the Google and android. The number of different iOS configurations that are still in active use and needs supporting is much smaller than for android. This reduces development challenges and testing requirements massively, and enables more time to be spent on fixing bugs/security issues, and developing new and exciting features. More importantly, the longer that you leave the upgrade process, the more likely that you’ll have a problem, and when you do, the less likely that your scenario will be reproducible, or even relevant to the current developmental process.

New features

Users will complain about updates and possible downtime disruption…if they didn’t, then I’d be surprised. The key here is to keep them informed, and highlight new features. This will help them appreciate the work that is being done so much more, and ensure that we as systems administrators are appreciated every day of the year.

In order to help with the above, Sales Agility provides 2 version streams:

  1. The Long Term Server version (which will be supported for the longest period of time and should ideally be used for production instances - Currently the 7.10.x development stream)
  2. The cutting edge fun version (which is supported but for a shorter period of time, and is great for testing/keeping up to date and trying out new ideas for the forthcoming LTS).

All SuiteCRMs deployed should be at the latest version of one of these 2 versions. There is a case for being a few behind to allow other people to act as ‘guinea pigs’ for you on production systems, but security is something that should not be compromised for the type of data we store in this software.

Resources:
Downloads link:


Upgrades link:

Discover how bad your security really is, and make sure that all issues are mitigated by looking at the release notes for each of the current versions:


Happy sysadmins day everyone!:

Let’s appreciate sysadmins every day:)

4 Likes

Happy sysadmin Day ! :tada: I’m sure we have a few in the community :smiley: