Is your system backwards compatible?

Providing upgrade paths and supporting backwards compatibility does require more planning by the project architects and you do have to be creative about ensuring that you are not paying a huge performance penalty as a result of the backwards compatibility. These goals can be achieved as evidenced by the thousands of companies and products that deal with this challenge every day.

Maintaining backwards compatibility and providing an upgrade path for users of previous versions is not something that is easy to pull off. In fact, some would argue that it is one of the biggest technical challenges that any software company will face.

Ultimately, every software company must face this decision – make it easy for your users or make it easy for your developers. Give your developers a green field to develop new features or make it easy for your existing customers to upgrade and take advantage of your new features. Millennium Group has always tried to take the path that made it easiest for our users. We believe that ultimately this allows our developers more time to focus on our current platform rather than trying to implement bug fixes in 2 or 3 different branches of our product.

Backwards compatibility is not something provided by every access control company.

At the end of the day, the backwards compatibility issue comes down to how best to serve the customer. The answer is easy – allow them to protect their investments and reduce the cost of implementation over a long period of time. Unlike in the cell phone industry where new customers are treated like kings and old customers are treated like a nuisance, we want all of our customers – past, present and future – to be able to benefit from our latest and greatest platform.

We do our best to make the upgrade process as seamless and painless as possible. Visit www.millennium-groupinc.com for more info.