It was one morning last week when we got a report about new firmware version for Communicator devices. That's always a serious situation, because we have learned that new firmware versions sometimes cause interoperability problems. A typical customer installation can contain applications from different software vendors, security applications, encrypted disks, customer specific settings etc. Some change in terminal firmware can cause problems for the whole installed system.

When we were getting our test devices flashed, I started (once again) to hope that we could get an alert about new firmware releases. Currently we get the information quite randomly: for example customer reports a problem or asks if there are any "known issues" related to some version. Then we try to get one device flashed and verified. If we could get an alert about a new firmware release, we could test the systems before customers get the firmware and fix the possible problems. I'd be happy if I just got a message telling that new firmware is out there.

This time the story has a happy ending: everything worked like a charm after firmware upgrade.