AO 2.8 and AO 2.7

[former_member640817]

Hello,

Can someone help clear my confusion as to why SAP has gone live with with AO 2.8 but continues to work on service packs for AO 2.7? (https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/Analysis+Office+Installation+and+Update)

I see AO 2.7 is now scheduled out to SP11 in Week 17 2020. Are fixes in upcoming 2.7 SPs going to be in upcoming 2.8 SPs? Why are there two versions of AO receiving SPs?

[boman_hwang · Accepted solution]

I think it is a similar approach to the BO platform releases, so the following pattern applies:

AO 2.8 will have new features and usually, SAP takes an older version of the previous version (in that case 2.7), will freeze that one and will add new functionality on top of that frozen version, so they have a stable base build the new version on.

In the meantime, there still bugs that get fixed in the current 2.7 branch and they continue to bring out service packs for that branch. That will mean, that by the time the new version (here 2.8) releases, there will be some fixes that are already in the 2.7 branch, but not yet in the 2.8 branch.

It usually takes SAP something like one SP or two in a new version to close the gap to the older branch and that one also gets some support for a bit just for all the customers who want to get fixes, but need more time to test and evaluate newer versions before they upgrade.