Would you imagine driving your car without insurance? Living in your home without insurance? Let your children go to school without insurance? Of course not and you want to be able to protect yourself from any risk on a daily basis. But there is one area where you may be very helpless in the event of problems if you have no safety net, it’s your Enfocus Switch production!
Your Switch workflow has become the backbone of your organization and hundreds of files flow every day. Efficiency is there, productivity as well. Everything is fine in the best of worlds, but suddenly… it’s a bad day. Your server has just crashed and does not restart. Or, you have updated your system and nothing is working anymore. Minutes and hours are running out and there is still no solution. What to do about it?
To avoid these headaches, we suggest that you take out all-risk insurance for your Enfocus Switch production. A brief presentation of your options…
In case of emergency
If your server crashes, you may have tried to reinstall Switch on another computer. Problem, when trying to activate your keys, the Enfocus server replies that the keys are already active and that they must first be deactivated. Yes, but… the server is dead!
When you purchase your Switch license, Enfocus gave you an Emergency Key, valid for 7 days from the activation date. This should give you enough time to ask Enfocus to disable the server key remotely; build a machine; reinstall the flows; and start again. If you do not have this key, ask your supplier to send it to you.
You might think that after all this emergency key will be enough for you when the time comes. But why wait until you are in a hurry to react? Wouldn’t you rather anticipate?
Safety above all
As soon as you have a Switch license in production, it is always difficult to develop new workflows without affecting the smooth running of the company. Example: a customer wanted to perform a version update. He therefore decided to shut down his production for one day for this purpose. Problem, impossible to restart the flows after the update. It was necessary to go back in a hurry. The result: a lost production day.
In any case, never update your OS or application without asking Enfocus or your supplier upfront. This will already save you a lot of trouble. We have communicated on the problems caused by the latest update of the Apple OS: Catalina.
Even minor flow modifications require shutting down production with all the regression/error risks that this can entail when restarting. Why take such a risk? The solution is to separate production and testing by setting up dedicated environments.
Development license
Thanks to the development license, you now have a machine on which you can test your modifications, validate Switch or OS updates, without affecting your production.
Once the changes have been validated, you will be able to deploy them in production in a snap. What peace of mind!
A development license represents an investment of about 20% of the costs of a production license. However, you will not be able to use this version for production. In addition, the flows cannot be active for more than 4 hours continuously.
Best protection
As we have seen, a development license has certain limitations such as not being able to be used in production. If you want to increase your production capacity with a second license; or simply have a test environment that you can convert to production in case of problems with the main production license (fail-over); or be able to load-balance jobs between the two switches; then the Tandem license is for you!
A Tandem license is a twin license of your main license. Any module acquired on the production license must be acquired on the Tandem license. But in exchange, you can obtain this second license at a reduced price, 50% discount if the Tandem license is acquired with initial purchase, 25% discount if the Tandem license is acquired at a later stage. Be careful, you can use your two production licenses (main and Tandem), but both systems must be located in the same production site.
Our opinion
Do not rely on the emergency key only. It is very likely that in the event of a crisis, the key will be difficult to find, a machine will not be available, the operation will take time…
You must consider your production license as a sacred, almost untouchable and therefore precious space. Protect it from unwanted updates and hot changes. If you do not have high production needs, at a minimum, opt for a development license. This will provide you with a dedicated testing and update environment on which to make your changes before deploying them in production.
Do you have important production needs? Is having a backup machine critical? Choose the Tandem license! You will have the best of both worlds. An unlimited testing environment that can be used in production.
Option | License | Restrictions | Production |
Emergency key | limited | 7 days of use maximum | yes, in case of emergency |
Development license | perpetual | 4 hours maximum | no |
Tandem license | perpetual | Identical configurations | yes |
You would like to secure your production but still hesitate on the right configuration? Contact us! We will be happy to evaluate your case and make you the best possible recommendation.
See you soon!
