Manage an upgrade of third party software

Saturday, Jul 23, 2016

CourseSales.com interfaces with a number of other third party systems, eg Moodle, just like CourseSales.com these systems get upgraded and might change they way they function. When you upgrade your software you need to co-ordinate this with us so that we can ensure your connection does not break and your customers experience the least amount of inconvenience as possible. We share some tips here to help this happen:

  • Confirm in advance the version you will be moving to, be sure to be exact, ie if you re moving to Moodle version 3.1.1 don’t just tell us you are moving to Moodle 3, while this might be true it is not specific enough for us to do thorough testing.
  • Where possible test the migration of your data to the new system, and confirm that a) your data works as expected and b) the CourseSales.com connection works as you expect it to.
  • Give us plenty of time to ensure that our systems work with your new version. We recommend at least 4 weeks notice.
  • Keep in mind that we might not support the latest release, cutting edge (with new untested functions) or beta releases, that is a version that is about 6 months old is usually more stable than the latest uploaded release.

As with other cloud service providers, when we upgrade our system then all users immediately have the upgraded version. Interactions with CourseSales.com are via the API, which is a common interface, upgrades or changes to the API are uncommon and widely broadcast. We find that upgrades when a software integration uses APIs tend to be less error prone. We recommend you use our API when integrating with CourseSales.com.