Legacy CHILI publisher software end-of-life March 31st, 2022

CHILI publish recently announced that it will cease development of the perpetually licensed product, CHILI publisher, with the release of version 6.5 in July 2021. While the official end-of-life is March 31st, 2022, customers are encouraged to switch to CHILI publisher Online immediately, so they can start reaping the benefits of this new service.

To be clear, this end-of-life does not apply to CHILI publisher Subscription customers who ‘self-host’ using an on-premises license. Reach out to your local contact or use our support portal to ask any questions you may have.

Although perpetual on-premises licenses have not been commercially sold for over 4 years, there are still a small number of customers using this type of license. If you’re one of those customers, don’t worry! We strongly believe in ‘No customer left behind’ and are here to support you during this transition. Be sure to scroll to the end of this post for important information and resources just for you.

Many software providers are transitioning to cloud services, but few explain why and how this benefits you – the customer. We believe in full transparency so let’s take a deeper look behind our motivation and how these changes affect our users.

Why did CHILI publisher move to a cloud-only service?

Not dissimilar to most modern software technologies, the future of CHILI publisher is in the cloud. Cloud-based products dominate the software landscape and provide services that span the gamut from project management to office productivity suites to software development tools to sales management tools. Everything runs in the cloud these days and for good reason… or should I say reasons.

Here are our top 10 reasons why CHILI publisher moved Online

1. Cost savings
2. Consistent user experience
3. Automatic system monitoring
4. Automatic software updates
5. Automatic backup and disaster recovery
6. Supportability
7. Flexibility
8. Quality control
9. Accelerated innovation
10. Development sandbox

• BONUS Cloud ecosystem

1. Cost savings

Moving to a unified cloud platform brings significant cost savings to both CHILI publish and to our customers.

By focusing our development efforts on building software to run on a single infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, we can spend less time maintaining support for multiple server configurations and versions. Additionally, due to economies of scale with cloud computing, we can invest heavily in the infrastructure, while offering the service at an affordable price.

From the customer’s perspective, costs are lower because there are no expensive hardware investments, ongoing maintenance costs, or resources needed for system management. These combined savings bring the total cost of ownership down and increase the overall return on investment.

2. Consistent user experience

With on-premises software, the user’s experience can be unpredictable because multiple factors contribute to the perceived performance of the software which include, but are not limited to:

• Server’s technical specifications, such as processing power, RAM, hard disk speed
• Speed of server connection to the internet

By building CHILI publisher Online on a unified technology stack and offering it as a Software as a Service (SaaS) product, we can ensure each customer will have an optimal and consistent experience when using the software.

3. Automatic system monitoring

When customers manage their servers behind firewalls or require VPNs to access, we can’t keep a watchful eye on the health and performance of the system. Additionally, with this model, it’s up to each customer to make sure their server’s operating system is up-to-date and secure. This limits our ability to ensure everything is running as it should.

CHILI publisher Online solves these challenges with automatic system monitoring. Our customers’ IT folks can rest easy knowing the service is constantly keeping tabs on itself. Furthermore, if an issue should arise, our crack Support team is notified so the issue can be resolved quickly.

4. Automatic software updates

It may seem like a simple thing but it’s far from insignificant. We understand resources are stretched thin and people frequently don’t have time for routine tasks, like updating software.

Automatic updates provide two huge benefits:

• Save time – Nobody needs to find and download the installers, install the update on a development system to test, and plan the upgrade on their production server.
• Immediate access – Whether it’s a new feature, minor improvement, or a bug fix, software updates can be rolled out as soon as they are available.

It’s also worth pointing out that because we now manage the full technology stack, we can deliver incremental updates faster, putting new features in your hands more quickly.

5. Automatic backup and disaster recovery

Nobody wants to think about disaster recovery – just typing it makes me superstitious and knock on wood to ward off the evil technology spirits. Let’s change the conversation then and talk about automatic backups.

Yet another routine task that’s difficult to make time for is backing up all your hard work – but nothing is more important. To save our customers from this necessary evil, we built automatic backups into CHILI publisher Online. Another worry-free feature that will help your IT folks sleep well knowing our rigorous backup regime is diligently storing your data for those just-in-case scenarios.

6. Supportability

Product support is all about eliminating variables to isolate, identify and troubleshoot the issue at hand. But when varying versions of the software are running locally on different types of hardware running various operating systems, there can be a lot of variables to account for.

Supporting a single technology stack is far more efficient and allows our support engineers to improve response time, eliminate the back-and-forth communication to gain access to on-premises systems, zero in on the issue, and resolve problems faster.

7. Flexibility

A cornerstone of cloud computing and storage is flexibility, and CHILI publisher Online is no exception. The nimble nature of our usage-based cloud service means customers can start small and scale up as needed. That last point is worth repeating – our product scales based on usage, not features – so you pay for what you need.

The service is currently available in three base plans: Business, Professional, and Private Cloud. Both Business and Professional tiers run on one of our four multi-tenant cloud services and the Private Cloud tier is a single instance service that can be located in any Azure data center. Additionally, customers can add production environments and increase output volumes as needed to fit their business model and production volumes.

8. Quality control

When developing software optimized to run on a single platform, our QA engineers can perform strict verification and validation procedures to ensure each build performs as expected. After the build passes QA, our deployment team can quickly roll out the updates system-wide, so every customer is using the latest, most stable version.

9. Accelerated innovation

By consolidating development around a single cloud technology, our software engineers can focus their resources on accelerating innovation and developing new features, rather than on maintaining legacy compatibility.

10. Development sandbox

Contrary to on-premises software, which requires physical hardware, it’s typically quite cost-effective to spin up a new instance or environment with cloud services. This has made it possible for us to provide each customer with a development sandbox to try upcoming features, test the next release candidate, or validate custom integrations.

Bonus reason to move to CHILI publisher Online

11. Cloud ecosystem

CHILI publisher is always part of an integrated ecosystem of software – and chances are, the other software you are using in this integrated solution are also cloud-based services. By moving all software components into the cloud, your entire platform will operate at peak performance due to the low latency between major cloud services.

What does this mean for perpetual license customers?

The official end-of-life is scheduled for March 31st, 2022, however customers who have this type of software license may renew their existing maintenance contract for 1 additional year. While no further updates will be available beyond version 6.5, customers who renew their contract will continue to receive support.

Preferably, customers should make the switch to our next generation product, CHILI publisher Online, as soon as possible so they can continue to receive valuable product updates, support, and have access to revolutionary new features not available in their legacy product – such as Dynamic Layouts and Smart Crop, which enables creative automation by allowing templates to intelligently scale and adapt to any size for print and digital.

If you’re interested in the technical details about moving to CHILI publisher Online, be sure to check out these resources on our support portal