SP CU and Hotfix Info

  • Updated

Ektron’s policy concerning requests for Hotfixes or Cumulative Updates (CUs) is as follows. Customers are required to update to the most recent release within their version to receive a CU or Hotfix for the version requested. For example if you are on version 8.7 SP1, an update to SP2 would be required and the CU would be delivered for 8.7 SP2. CU's and Hotfixes are approved on a per issue basis. Hotfix requests and CU's require an internal escalation process, where Ektron Support reviews the issue with Ektron Engineering to identify the impact to the customer, the risk involved in a fix and other key factors to determine if a fix is viable. If the issue meets criteria for a fix to be released, you will be notified. Some of the items that factor into this decision are

  1. The issue must not have a valid workaround
  2. Multiple customers are having the same issue
  3. The issue is severely impacting production environments

In the event of a 3rd party changing their API in which we integrate with, these fixes may or may not be available for older versions depending on the update needed. In this case you may be required to upgrade to a newer version where we can support the functionality.  
Below is a list of the types of software updates we provide.

  • Service Pack (SP)
    • A SP is an update including only minor fixes of issues both reported by our customers and found internally.
    • It is usually much larger than CU and includes fixes from the previous CUs and service packs. For instance if you are upgrading to 9.2 SP2 from 9.2, SP2 will include all fixes from SP1, all CUs on top of 9.2 SP1, and any additional fixes specific to the 9.2 SP2 release.  
  • Cumulative Update (CU)
    • There are 3 Types of CU's that you may see. CU's are a compilation of fixes reported by customers to resolve minor issues between versions and SP's
      • Site Updates: Updates for specific sites that are applied to each site individually. These include fixes that will be added to future SP's.
      • Service Updates: Updates for the Ektron Windows Service. These updates always upgrade clients to the latest version of the Ektron Windows Service and should be backwards compatible with site versions.
      • Server and Utility Updates: Updates for search server, configuration, or diagnostic utilities included in the base installation.
  • Hotfix
    • Hotfixes are for specific issues found in older releases (prior to 8.6).

Wherever possible, Ektron strives to provide our customers with timely resolutions for the specific version there are using. The fastest and most effective path is always on the latest versions and service packs for our releases. There are often many additional benefits that customers can realize by staying on the most current releases. Your success with Ektron products is very important to us and we do understand that there may sometimes be extenuating circumstances that prevent an update to the latest service pack or release version. For these extraordinary situations we do have mechanisms in place to try to provide these types of resolutions depending on business impact and technical feasibility. This technical note is meant to provide some insight into the hotfix and CU