Atlas Release State and Support Impact

We have been listening to our clients, who indicated that our quarterly release cadence sometimes caused them challenges due to internal processes, resources, priorities etc.

Therefore we have, as of Atlas 4.0, moved to an approach where clients themselves will be able to upgrade to a new Atlas version at their convenience.

This was a deliberate choice because we want our clients to have the best possible experience in anything related to our Atlas product, including the regular upgrade experience.

As our clients control the upgrade sequence, it is important that we ensure that each remain on a valid, supported and most of all secure platform.

Therefore, and to make sure we are fully transparent on how important regular updates are, we have defined Atlas Release States and for each one the corresponding Support Impact.

Definitions of Release States and corresponding Support Impact

The table below provides a clear definition and the support impact that each Atlas environment is in. 

State	Definition	Support Impact
General Availability	This is the most recent stable release (has had at least 2 hotfixes applied) and is our recommended version for Atlas. Clients are encouraged to be on the General Availability release.	Fully supported, hotfixes will be provided on a monthly basis.
Controlled Availability	Controlled availability is a state comparable with Microsoft's "Public Preview". This is a release that was just tested on QA and UAT but hasn't yet been deployed to many or any clients. The risk of finding issues is higher than with a General Availability release. Clients who wish to take new functionality early may move to this release or deploy to a non-prod environment if they have one.	Fully supported for clients who have implemented this "public preview", hotfixes will be provided on a monthly basis.
Legacy	Legacy versions will continue to be supported but we advise clients to be on a legacy version as close to General Availability as possible.	No hotfixes will be provided.
Unsupported	Unsupported versions are too far behind modern Atlas and Microsoft technologies to be supported. We can not guarantee a properly functioning or secure environment. We cannot provide support nor provide any fixes to this release. Clients are recommended to move to at least a Legacy version of the Atlas platform.	We'll flag when clients are either on, or soon to be on, a unsupported version and we will propose a short term (2-4 weeks) rectification program, helping them to move to a supported version. Clients who don't move to a supported version within that short term can still raise tickets but the message will be that they have to move to a supported version before we can troubleshoot or fix anything.
Alpha (In development)	Not available to clients.	No support impact.
Beta (ClearPeople internal testing)	Not available to clients.	No support impact.

The above table gives clear insight in the state and support impact an environment can be in. This is linked to our release cycle - check this article where we provide you a full insight on our Atlas Release Cycle