Feature Packs

In late 2006, Workbrain announced the Feature Pack program as a way for clients maximize the return on their investment in our product. This program changed the way the product was released.

Through the release of Workbrain 5.0, the company had delivered a new major or minor version every 12 to 18 months. While this is standard industry practice, our clients could not keep up with this cadence of releases. In response, Workbrain decided to lengthen the time between major or minor releases while delivering new, optional functionality through Feature Packs.

What is meant by “optional functionality?” By default, all the features delivered in a Feature Pack are disabled. Clients can selectively turn on those features that they want to deploy to their users. The features are designed to be non-invasive to existing code where possible in an effort to minimize potential regressions. And of course, Feature Packs and the features delivered with them are thoroughly tested to ensure that no functional or performance regressions are introduced.

Feature Packs are cumulative. This means that users that take Feature Pack 3 get the features delivered in Feature Packs 1 and 2, too. Of course, all the features are still disabled, allowing clients to enable only the features they want to deploy.

Finally, there is no additional cost for Feature Packs. Clients with a valid maintenance agreement are entitled to receive Feature Packs just as they are entitled to receive Fix packs. In fact, Feature Packs are delivered with Fixpacks and deployed the same way that Fixpacks are deployed (note: we delivered a Fixpack Installer in Feature Pack 2 to automate the installation of Fixpacks and Feature Packs).

To date, Feature Packs have been delivered once per quarter, and this schedule is planned to continue through the release of Feature Pack 5 (Version 5.0.5.0) in Q2 2008. At that point, we will slow down the delivery of Feature Packs and delivery one or two feature packs per year.