Making Sense of Versioning and Support Policy

EPM Support Documentation

Thanks to Oracle’s well-worth-following Business Analytics – Proactive Support blog, I’ve been introduced to a couple of interesting support policy documents relating to the EPM stack:

These documents also reference the more widely applicable Lifetime Support Policy: Oracle Applications (‘LSP’).

With no disrespect intended, I’d guess that many EPM practitioners are unaware of some finer points of support policy. I know that I was! And without understanding the content of these documents, it’s impossible to give comprehensive answers to questions such as ‘For how much longer is Oracle committed to providing fixes for my 11.1.2 system?’ (the answer may be more complicated than you think). However, the documents themselves tend towards legalese, and they don’t always make completely clear what the real-world implications of the policies are. The GPEC document was updated on March 6th to include 11.1.2.4 information, so this is an opportune time for a plain-English review.

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