The proposed approach to most projects intentionally includes three complementary layers of support, to support the full lifecycle and operations, indefinitely.  Each component should be considered a critical element of a comprehensive support strategy. Through various server and web level monitoring, the team will be notified of many possible issues within moments of a site down, server down or major functionality down situation.

1. Your development team will be providing ongoing custom site development and maintenance support, as well as in-application administration support for the site implementation.
2. Omegabit provides comprehensive operational support with a deep awareness about Liferay-based site operations and, patterns of behavior.  Omegabit is the first-line, 24x7x365 support for emergencies, and typically is able to help resolve issues before they have to be escalated for additional support.  A 1-800 number and email support will escalate initially to Omegabit for support requests. Depending on the specific situation, Omegabit will leverage your development team, or potentially Liferay Support to help rapidly escalate issues that require attention in a manner that is not typical of most hosting providers or framework suppliers.
3. Liferay DXP Software, used as the foundation for the site design, includes comprehensive software framework support including regular security patches, as well as customer-specific hotfixes to critical issues. Liferay also provides critical framework support, patching and developer tools and for customizations to ensure that any modifications stay current.

Patch management is documented with visibility by the customer and application sponsors via security ticketing system supplied by Omegabit for the purposes of approval workflow, audit, and historical record. Customer specific Wikis are also maintained to help document information that is proprietary to the Client implementation and that is important to all parties. Schedules and approvals are managed in direct coordination with Client teams to ensure changes are controlled and do not cause breakage. Actions are scheduled according to policies defined in the Omegabit SOW/SLA, except where explicitly overridden by special policy or Client requirement.

Yes, to the limits deemed appropriate by the customer.  Omegabit manages Liferay installations that vary from completely managed environments, to mixed managed environments where Omegabit assumes control of production but not development environment, to a more traditional turnkey approach.  In all cases, Omegabit will work with the Customer to ensure that best practices are followed, and is able to provide recommendations on methods and procedures that will help ensure the smooth rollout, operation and maintenance of the application and runtime environments.

Patches relating to security or access control will be prioritized over other non-critical tasks and expedited wherever possible.  Software patches requiring special personnel or procedures, an extended outage, or client-side testing and coordination will be applied at best possible speed, and typically take a minimum of 48 hours and up to 5 business days to coordinate and execute.  All outages are coordinated with Client, except where necessitated by emergency repair.

Infrastructure patching of our cloud occurs transparently and is typically no impact to you thanks to the redundant nature.  If impactful maintenance must occur, we provide a week or more notice in advance and will coordinate with you to ensure it occurs during a planned window and is clearly communicated (this is rare, and we understand the potential impact to your operations and will coordinate, accordingly).

For your hosted infrastructure, patch cycles are always coordinated with your team to avoid interruptions to production services and "surprises" with compatibility (both OS and Liferay/application layer).  We help remind of this schedule but it is ultimately up to your team to approve the updates and allow the opportunity for the work to occur.  ]]

We recommend a cycle of no longer than 3mos, except where there is a specific need (e.g. for urgent security fix or, function).  Generally speaking, OS same-release patches occur without incident, but may require a service restart.  For Liferay, your engineering team will typically need to integrate the patches with any custom builds and test extensively.  So we consider that part of the custom development/maintenance lifecycle.

For any patching or configuration changes, we do strongly recommend a prerelease strategy to prove out the change before it is promoted to production.

We are here to help support that lifecycle, and are able to help the engineering team identify potential conflicts with patches and fixpacks vs. custom code using the Liferay patching tools.