Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) status of v.90 (fwd)
Once upon a time Jason Nealis shaped the electrons to say...
>will say in having this Open Beta Ascend has taken a step forward in
Actually it is a closed beta.
Closed beta - beta test open to a controlled group of users with an NDA
type of agreement. So the info is unavailable, or closed, to the general
public.
Open beta - beta code is freely available to any and all to try, and all
related information is openly discusable.
In my experience are several companies it generally goes:
Alpha test (internal and very small number of trial sites), closed beta
(code is fairly stable, moved to broader number of trial sites to get
more real world data. But it is still too early and has too many unknowns
to risk unleashing on the world. Also, controlling the number of people
in the group lets you keep support out of it and interface directly with
a beta controller for a more direct link to engineering), then open beta
(open to anyone willing to take the risk. You usually find oddball real
world issues here that just didn't happen in closed beta. Support is the
contact now, and it gives them some time to develop experience with the code
before it is a full release. Basically 'run at your own risk').
Sometimes, if things don't go well, you might have code go back and forth
from closed to open beta. Something serious happens in open beta, they
may isolate the reporting sites and do a closed beta for them until they
find a fix, then release a new open beta with that fix for everyone.
The end result of all this being, of course, a full release.
Right now apparently 3Com is in release (but from the reports it sounds
like they could have stood to hold a longer beta run), Lucent is in open
beta, and Ascend is in closed beta.
-MZ
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