Easter is here a little early this year: we were able to wrap up our Windows release of 5.0 for new customers running against Oracle 11G. You can find the details here: Not authorized to view the specified document 3146. The release also marks our first patch for 5.0 and with that we have a few important notes for you:

1. Our naming convention now includes patches as the last digit in the version. So "5.0 Patch 1" is called "5.0.1".
2. Our installer will be upgraded with every patch so that new installs will not need to install the software and then apply patches. (Hooray)
3. The same installer is used for new installs, and to apply patches. So to upgrade 5.0 to 5.0.1 you run the 5.0.1 installer against your nodes and it will detect you are performing an upgrade and behave differently.
4. The installer supports automated replay of an upgrade, so you can capture the upgrade of one node and then replay that install against other nodes.

We are working on our SQL Server new install release tentatively slated for May 31st and our 5.0 upgrader (to allow existing Clients to upgrade their system) which is set to release towards the end of Summer. However we don't want existing Clients to feel left out, so we rounded up a set of patches for both 4.0 and 4.1 Clients (Not authorized to view the specified document 3144).

Update: One other platform support item I forgot to mention on the original posting: for those of you who love Community Enterprise Operating Systems we now officially support CentOS as well as Red Hat!

Happy Easter!

Last week I had hinted at some news on the 5.0 front... and here it is: we are accelerating our development against Windows and SQL Server for new installations. The previous projections had Windows and SQL Server support in July. The new delivery dates are:

• April 30th for new installation on Windows 2k8R2 against an Oracle database
• May 31st for new installations on SQL Server

Those deliverables will be for new installations and if we can deliver earlier, we will.

If you haven't seen all the great features in 5.0, check this out: Not authorized to view the specified document 3040.

One other note: if you have noticed that some of our cross document links always scroll to the bottom of the document it is a known issue with our content management system. We are upgrading the system this evening (2/10/12) and the latest upgrade should fix the links so that they link to the top of the page.

5.0 is nearly here (see xMatters Five Ohhhhhhh!), and with it comes some of the coolest conference bridging technologies known to man: our Find You Conferencing is built into our Advanced Messaging (aka Scenarios) and if you are licensed for it you can create and manage conference bridges. The feature harnesses all of the calling power of your system to contact multiple concurrent recipients who are then pulled into either the xMatters conferencing bridge, or into your existing conferencing solution. No more manual call-trees, and no worrying about trying to write down a phone number or bridge ID so that you can dial in. Simply answer the call and Find You Conferencing will pull you into the bridge.

Scenario initiators can monitor the conference from a purpose-built panel to mute, disconnect and invite more people. They also have an audit report to see who joined the bridge, when people joined, and when people left. Wouldn't this have been handy the last time you had a Sev 1?

Check out a live video here:

Find You Conference requires you to have a license enabling Advanced messaging and also requires message credits to power it.