Best Practice for Mobile App Upgrades

Important Information

This document describes what we believe is best practice around deploying and maintaining a mobile field solution. We strongly recommend that you read this document and embed these processes within your own business.

Automatic App Updates

Due to the complexity of WorkMobile, its vast number of uses across many types of business and the huge range of mobile devices that we support, it is unfortunately not possible for us to test each and every use case. In order to minimise any potential disruption to your business when we release upgrades and patches, we strongly advise that you adopt a policy of internally testing each of your WorkMobile solutions prior to allowing your mobile workforce to upgrade their own WorkMobile App.

In order to do this you should adopt the following procedure:

1. Configure all devices to not allow automatic updates. If you’re unsure how to do this then please refer to your device operating manual
2. Have a designated device solely for the purposes of testing. When a new version of the WorkMobile App is released, your device will inform you that a new version is available. Upgrade this device with the latest version.
3. Test your WorkMobile solution(s) to ensure that it still behaves as expected. Should you encounter any issues, these should be reported via our support desk on wmsupport@workmobileforms.com
4. Only when you are happy that the upgrade behaves as expected should you then inform your mobile users that they are safe to upgrade their own devices.
    

Important

Before upgrading, your users should ensure that they have synchronised their device to ensure that any data still residing in the outbox or drafts folder does not get removed

Operating System Updates

You should also adopt a similar approach regarding major OS upgrades. We strongly recommend that you adopt a policy of ensuring that your mobile users do not upgrade their operating systems immediately when their device informs them that their is an upgrade available.

Again we recommend that you use a dedicated test device with which you should apply the upgrade first. Only once you’re happy that WorkMobile is continuing to behave as expected should you then inform you mobile users that it is safe to upgrade their own devices.