What is a JMP maintenance release?

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What's the purpose of a JMP maintenance release?

We recently announced our latest maintenance release of JMP: JMP 14.1.

JMP 14.1 is a general maintenance release that contains enhancements and bug fixes to our March 2018 feature release, JMP 14.0. Reproducible crashes and numeric issues have been corrected. We recommend this maintenance release for all JMP users.

On jmp.com/update, you will find the JMP and JMP Pro release notes for maintenance releases of JMP. These helpful documents list the incremental new features, bug fixes and improvements included in each JMP update. This is different from the New Features document found in the JMP Help menu that lists the main new features for that major release.

Generally, the items that we are able to address in a maintenance release are smaller in scope than those introduced in a major feature release. During maintenance, we may introduce minor new features or slight enhancements to existing features, but focus largely on bug fixes, documentation improvements, and translation updates. If you’d like more information about how features get into new major versions, you can check out my previous blog post.

It’s always important to get the latest version of JMP as quickly as possible so that you can report any feedback you have or bugs you encounter to our technical support team at support@jmp.com. Once our team releases a major version, we have a relatively short window for considering customer reported bug fixes for inclusion in the next maintenance release. If our window for maintenance fixes has closed when a problem is reported, we will need to wait to address it until the next major release.

We offer maintenance releases two ways: 1) web updaters, which are available at jmp.com/update and 2) full installers, which JMP license administrators may request a short time after the web updaters are available. If you manage the JMP license at your site, we will email you automatically when a maintenance release is available. If your site has already deployed JMP 14.0, you may elect to use either the web updaters or request full installers to update your users’ installations. However, if your site has not yet deployed JMP 14, you will need to request JMP 14.1 full installers.

To make sure you are the first to know when a maintenance release is available, you should select File > Preferences > JMP Updates and click the Check for Updates option.

Customers who hold an annual license to JMP are entitled to receive every release of JMP, major or minor. You can expect the JMP team to release a new major version with new features about every 18 months, and to follow it with one or two maintenance releases. The first is usually planned  about fourt months after the major release ships, and the second usually follows four to six months later.