ERP software suppliers typically offer an annual enhancement upgrade and periodic “fix” releases. This traditional approach not only means a long wait for enhancements but for users these annual releases have created an expensive and invasive process often requiring extensive testing and downtime, business re-engineering, potential retraining and lots of problems with any customisations.
Worse still these barriers and costs have caused many companies to stop or delay upgrading, creating rapid obsolescence in their critical support systems. Over time the effort and cost required to “catch-up” becomes prohibitive, leaving the organisation languishing on old systems with ever increasing lost opportunities and increasing support costs.
Forget all that because with Greentree’s Continuous Deployment approach you have the ability to apply updates and changes to standard and custom software solutions, on a regular basis, at low cost and with minimal business impact.
No other software supplier in Greentree’s market space offers or supports this strategy. No other vendor offers a single point upgrade capability combining standard product enhancements working cohesively with customisations.
With Continuous Deployment the ongoing cost of enhancing and maintaining your critical business software is dramatically lowered and you are automatically provided with the latest and greatest tools for competitive advantage and business growth.
Continuous Deployment in action
The “Package” Approach
Once a customer’s Greentree system has been implemented the Greentree update and maintenance platform can be deployed. Greentree provides it’s customers with a software packaging application (Packman) that enables all Greentree and JADE provided software updates to be applied to their systems through a single automated application.
Greentree also embraces an open source approach to our standard Greentree software with our community of authorised Value Added Developer partners (VAD’s). To support this approach, and maximise the effectiveness of this extended development community, we have evolved a sophisticated development framework that allows Greentree and our VAD’s to build custom functionality as discrete add-on components and apply these easily to a standard Greentree environment.
To overcome the challenge of multiple updates being applied via different methods to customer systems, we have designed and developed this unique package release process that supports use by many developers, applying updates to a single customers system without conflict.
This provides customers with a low cost packaged approach to the deployment of their Greentree software and offers considerable advantages - both in speed and frequency of deployment of new software versions, as well as stability of product and platform.
The advantages this provides for customers are:
- All updates to the software are to the current version resulting in responsive delivery and rapid turnaround of software upgrades, fixes and customisations
- Customisations can be seamlessly included in the package process
- There are no old versions or individual patches or fixes. Changes are all released progressively and managed in sequence.
- Customers do not have to wait for a new version release at a later date to get changes to the software. As soon as the new software feature is developed it’s available. This represents a time saving of many months or even years over conventional methods.
Key features of the packaging system are:
- No service pack can be applied out of sequence
- All packages can be implemented at all sites
- Customised site releases are managed the same as production releases
- One production version to support and maintain
Getting Technical - our Object Orientated advantage
Our competitors develop in languages and across databases that are not integrated development environments, where the database and program layers are typically independent of each other. As a result, they are forced to release new updates or versions as entire replacements to existing programs. This can result in large scale change even for the smallest software modification.
Greentree’s Object Orientated development and deployment platform (JADE) provides a development toolset and database within the same technical IDE environment, where all programs and data are stored within the one Object Orientated database.
As a result program and database components can be managed down to the smallest possible elements and when a change is made only that element is required to be issued via our release process.
Quality, Quality, Quality
Greentree has been developing business solutions for over 20 years. Drawing on that experience, and through harnessing the best innovative technology, we have developed numerous quality processes and employ a multi layered approach to ensuring the delivery of highest quality software to our customers including:
- An integrated testing methodology at both code and application functional levels. This is driven by the design of comprehensive test plans which are continually updated as functional changes are applied to Greentree to ensure consistent and easily repetitive testing can be applied during the quality assurance cycle.
- Use of code/class change management systems to provide source library management and change specific test platforms. This ensures that changes are not “lost” across releases and that testing is undertaken against the current production version of Greentree.
- Automated testing tools to reduce manual effort, increase test throughput, and ensure consistency.
- Automated process checklists within the central development environment to monitor the development life-cycle and continually check that quality review processes are adhered to.
Documentation that Matches Functionality
As each Greentree change is released, we provide detailed release notes and these automatically update the Greentree Online Help system. Customers are advised of changes applied to their system immediately they log in and can go directly to the detail of changes or review these at a later time within the online help. This information can be viewed by release as well as functional area.
Greentree’s Connection Manager
Greentree’s Connection Manager enables you to centralise the administration of user connections. This minimises the requirement for IT support when new users are added to the network, and offers the security of knowing all users are using the most up to date version of the software.
Centralised Administration & User Synchronisation – The primary benefit associated with Greentree’s Connection Manager is that server settings and files only need to be maintained in one place. Each time a user connects to Greentree, the connection manager performs a check and refreshes user files from the server if they are out of date. This ensures each user is using the most up to date version of the software. For example, if a new version of FREE, our Excel reporting tool, is released, the user will automatically receive any new files required to run the updated version of FREE next time it connects to Greentree.
Load Balancing
Using the Greentree Connection Manager guarantees that new users always automatically connect to the application server which has the least number of users currently connected to it. This works for any number of application servers, running on different machines. The ability to load balance in this way means you can maximise network efficiency in terms of connection and response times.
|
