Major updates

Major updates are quarterly releases that include one or more or all of the following components – application binaries for bug fixes, new enhancements and security fixes, and OS and Middleware version update. IBM publishes the major update schedule at the beginning of every year to help you plan your yearly project plans such that it does not impact the IBM published upgrade schedule.

IBM Sterling Order Management System follows the Continuous Delivery support lifecycle policy to better support our customers.

The Continuous Delivery (CD) model matches with how IBM is providing updates to Sterling Order Management System since its release in 2018. Aligning the lifecycle support policy to the Continuous Delivery model provides a more accurate representation of the Sterling Order Management System product updates and improved clarity for product support. A new Continuous Delivery version-numbering scheme is introduced. The first update to include the numbering is in Q2 2022, which is 10.0.2206.0 where,
  • The first two parts remain 10.0.
  • The third part indicates the major quarterly update in the YYMM format, where YY is the year and MM is the last month of the quarter. For example, YY as 22 for 2022 and MM as 03 for Q1, 06 for Q2, and 09 for Q3.
  • The fourth part indicates minor updates and increments sequentially, from 0 for each major update, followed by 1 for the first minor update, 2 for the second minor update, and 3 for the third minor update.
IBM provides major and minor updates for Sterling Order Management System monthly, on the 1st Friday of the month, per the respective major and minor update schedules.

IBM owns the major update of your Sterling Order Management System environments where you cannot opt out of any of the major updates.

IBM releases the major update developer toolkit at least a week before the major update schedule and sends you an email notification, which includes a link to the Resolved issues for IBM Sterling Order Management. IBM recommends you to download the latest developer toolkit and upgrade your existing developer toolkit or set up a new developer toolkit and test your existing customization before your cloud environments are updated.

IBM updates your environments in the following sequence:
  • Development and QA environments
  • Master Configuration and PreProduction environments
  • Production environment

Communication of major updates

You can obtain your update schedule from the CSM or Onboarding contact. IBM owns the update process and notifies you by email, 24 hours before the update starts. The update process is automated and notifications are also automatically handled. Notifications are sent for start and completion of the update process.
Note: To receive email notifications about the update schedules, maintenance periods, and other service-related updates, refer to Distribution list for email notifications.

Before the update

To help you test new features and enhancements, IBM provides the latest developer toolkit that you can download from Self Service. The latest developer toolkit might not always correspond to an environment-specific developer toolkit version because the latest developer toolkit always corresponds to the latest major or minor-released version. For more information about downloading the developer toolkit, see Downloading the containerized developer toolkit.

Downtime for lower and higher environment update

  • Update takes approximately 1 hour for lower environment (Development, QA, Master Configuration) and approximately 1.5 hours for higher environment (Preproduction, Production).
  • During the update, any actions that are triggered for the environment in the IBM Self Service tool do not run immediately and the status is set to In queue. After the update is complete, actions with the In queue status are processed according to the order in which they were triggered and the status is changed to In progress.
  • The environment that is undergoing an update is not available for any self-serve operation until the update is complete. Post update, the IBM Self Service application is operational.
  • You can continue to access the Sterling Order Management System web applications.
  • Agent or Integration servers are down for approximately 10 minutes. After the update is complete, the agent or integration servers that were running before the update will start automatically.

After the update

After your environment is updated, run tests to verify. For any issues, open a support ticket.

New features and enhancements

For more information about the new features and enhancements, refer the What's New.