Yesterday I asked the question how often a Software-as-a-Service provider should provide updates? Here is one live customer reaction “…they [the users] will go to use their Envysion the way that they have in the past and – now they have to do something different…” The point of this comment being that updates can be disruptive. When changes are made to an application, it can result in a user being unable to accomplish their tasks in the same fashion or perhaps a link to the application isn’t working anymore. This can be very frustrating for users.

Imagine the irony to the development team when they see such a comment with respect to a new feature that has been developed that, in their eye, much improves the application!

Newsgator has taken a good approach to this problem. When they recently modified their GUI, they provided a link to the old version for those who didn’t want to try the new one.

However, from a development perspective, providing backward compatibilty becomes costly over time.

Envysion continues to push monthly updates of bug fixes and features. Whether they have to revsit this approach will be interesting to watch.