Overview

This document outlines OpenMethods’s End-of Life (EOL) and support policy for its products and services and the timing guidelines for the three (3) components of the Retirement Announcement, Product End-of- Life(EOL) and Product End-of-Support(EOS).  Eligibility for product support under the EOL Policy requires that the customer be on a current Subscription Agreement with OpenMethods in the case of On-Premise software or that there are no overdue invoices for a SaaS that are billed in arrears.

Retirement/EOL notifications will be provided to customers via documentation portal(docs.openmethods.com). In some cases, customers may be contacted directly by the account team.  When a retirement/EOL is announced for a product, a recommended migration path to alternative versions of products, when applicable, will be provided in the announcement. However, OpenMethods makes no representations or warranties concerning whether the alternative product will offer the same or similar features.

Customers of legacy premise products with a current subscription contract may be offered replacement products, as an update to the EOL product and be required to migrate to cloud enabled replacements of the EOL product without representation of parity for features and/or functions. Certain costs may not be included in a replacement migration, such as (but not limited to): third party product; ancillary licenses; implementation; and other professional services. If you have questions about your current subscription and support status, please contact your account manager.

Products reach EOL for a number of reasons including changing market demands, technology innovation and development driving changes in the product, the products simply mature over time, etc.  While this is an established part of a product life cycle, OpenMethods recognizes that EOL product life milestones must be clearly stated to allow you, our customers, to plan accordingly with your business operations.  There can be circumstances requiring the accelerated retirement of functionality:

• Essential Changes: 
  • These represent changes necessary to ensure the integrity of our services, and therefore need to occur as quickly as possible. In these situations, customer communications will be issued with as much advance notice as possible.

• Third-party Software:
  • Product, Features and functionalities integrated with third-party software may need to be retired due to the third-party vendor making their piece of the integration unavailable. In these situations, the timing and pace of the retirement is determined by the third-party vendor support, and customer communications will be issued with as much advance notice as possible

The general policy guidelines for OpenMethods releases and products are as follows.  

Retirement Announcement

This is a general announcement for cloud service retirements entering Product EOL process, specifying the critical dates of commercial availability. 

• On-Premise software: 
  • The EOL announcement schedule for a release is reached when OpenMethods makes commercially available 2 minor or 1 major release of the product on the OpenMethods website.  Note that OpenMethods no longer offers On-Premise software for customer solutions.

• SaaS products: 
  • Hosted components of Shared SaaS services are released by OpenMethods to all customers within a region at the same time and there is no access to or ability to use earlier versions thereafter. Tenanted components of SaaS products will be released as part of the product lifecycle cadence(which may or may not coincide with new releases of hosted components), at which point the superseded version will no longer be made available to customers for sale.  

OpenMethods will exercise commercially reasonable efforts to provide at least 4 months’ notification that the product will enter “End-of-Life”.  From the date of notification, until the product is no longer available, OpenMethods will provide best efforts support, possible critical bug fixes and possible work-arounds or patches.  

Product - End of Life (EOL) 

Retirements due to availability of new versions and/or product obsolescence

The date following which the OpenMethods product is not manufactured, improved, repaired, maintained, or supported. In the case of a SaaS product the online service will no longer be available or accessible.

• Hosted elements of SaaS products: 
  • These are updated by OpenMethods and there is no access to or support of older versions after the EOL announcement Date. On-premise and/or Tenanted components of SaaS products will continue to be supported for 2 minor or 1 major release of the product.

When EOL is announced,  the impacted version will no longer receive releases for fixes, improvements or revisions.

Product - End of Support (EOS) 

Ending support of EOL versions that will trigger environmental upgrades to retain customer support.

Notice will appear on the customer portal (docs.openmethods.com) under the Product Support Pages. We encourage you to visit this site regularly as it contains useful information regarding OpenMethods’s end-of-life program.

Notes

Subscription Agreements are all-inclusive with OpenMethods. 

This means that product support is provided for the product line; support is not tied to a specific product version. If necessary to resolve a reported problem, customers may be required to upgrade to the latest version if they are running an unsupported version while still under an active agreement.  In cases of significant changes to a product’s technical architecture, OpenMethods reserves the right to end-of-life that product with 60 days notice.

Definitions

• Product EOL process 
  • A process that guides the final business operations associated with the product life cycle. The End-of- Product Life process consists of a series of technical and business milestones and activities that, once completed, make a product obsolete. Once obsolete, the product is not sold, manufactured, improved, repaired, maintained, or supported. In the case of a SaaS product the online service will no longer be available or accessible.

• End-of-Life 
  • The date following which the OpenMethods product is not manufactured, improved, repaired, maintained, or supported. In the case of a SaaS product the online service will no longer be available or accessible.

• Release
  • A major release is defined as a change in the product release name as in OpenMethods CX Suite v6.9 to OpenMethods CX Suite v7.0 or if the product’s major number (to the left of the dot) changes.  A minor release is defined as a change in the product release name OpenMethods CX Suite v6.7 to OpenMethods CX Suite v6.9 or if the product’s minor number (to the right of the dot) changes.

• Content
  • Updates OpenMethods Products may require regular updates to keep track of the latest threats or information. Content updates include software, Infrastructure  and other updates.

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