Making upgrades easier in HCL Launch

HCL Launch is built with a lot of features to make sure your deployments run smoothly and make your life easier. One of my favorite recent enhancements that came out in v. 7.0.4 is a change we made to automation plugin upgrades.

In the past, upgrading the HCL Launch server to the latest version could be very time consuming. An upgrade of the server may update many plugins and, in turn, many processes. This could take hours, even days.

Now, we’ve reconfigured the HCL Launch upgrade process to be lightning fast. Instead of updating everything at once, processes and plugins are updated on the fly as you use them. This means the first time you start your HCL Launch server after an upgrade, you can get to work right away instead of waiting hours for updates to finish.

This is a game changer for administrators who previously had to set aside server downtime in order to run upgrades. Now, server admins have a more relaxed, faster upgrade experience. Imagine what you can do with this extra time!

End users will see a small difference in their processes. Before this enhancement, each plugin update resulted in a new process version, which bogged down the server and slowed down work. Now, every process automatically uses the latest version of automation plugins associated with it. For the first time, old process versions can leverage the latest version of your plugins, even snapshots! Since all of our plugins are backwards compatible, you can be sure that these automatic plugin updates won’t interrupt your workflow.

We’re always looking for ways to make our “deploy anything, anywhere” tool, HCL Launch, more user friendly. If you have any suggestions for features and enhancements, we’d love to hear them! Click here to send us a note.