[ic] surviving upgrades

Christopher J. Andre' chris at tastingroom.com
Tue Jun 1 14:13:16 EDT 2004


Hello All,

After almost 8 months in the making, I am just about to launch an
interchange store for a winery client
(http://inter.dev.atwss.com/cgi-bin/p2.html).  FWIW, I am not a
programmer... but I have read just about every page of documentation on your
site.  

When surfing the icdevgroup site, I noticed this on the 'about interchange'
page: 

"If you need functionality that Interchange doesn't yet provide, it is easy
to incorporate it yourself in an extensible way that survives upgrades. If
you don't have the time or expertise to do so, there is a strong group of
consultants who inhabit the the user mail list who can help you produce it."

FYI, the store we've been working on is based on interchange 5.0.  I want
the company I hired to upgrade the store to 5.2 so that the site could get
the most recent security fixes.  Somehow they think this is a task that will
take almost a week.  I was curious what the group thought about that....  If
it takes 32 hours to upgrade one store, then having to upgrade 10 stores
would take 320 hours, and cost a lot of money.  This doesn't sound like
changes were incorporated in an extensible way. In my mind, it seems that
the company made customizations without regard for extensibility.  I was
wondering if someone could confirm or repudiate my assumptions....  

I had planned to use this catalog as a skeleton. I really want to know if it
has to to be so costly, not to mention time consuming, to upgrade every site
each time there is a security fix etc..

For reference, here is a quote from the email the company sent me..

"the features you requested during development of this site required strong
customization of the interchange functionality/source code. We can be
responsible only for the code we developed. For the code provided by
Interchange we have no responsibility. To upgrade the Interchange and apply
all fixes to the customized version significant time is required. I think
this is common sense. If you buy a TV, and then open it and re-make some
things inside it yourself, it is not already the same as the original TV you
bought. And if they then say produce a new remote-control station for this
TV model it may or may NOT work with your TV because you've already changed
smth in the original model. I can only offer you to make upgrade on report
basis - we will track time spent and you pay for it based on report. It can
be less than 32 hours or more. At this stage, we do not know what fixes they
have issued at Interchagne and how they will influence our functionality."

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me...I am eager to launch this
puppy, and this seems to be one of the last hurdles.

-Chris Andre
TastingRoom.com



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