Application of the Week – WhatsApp Desktop (Part 3)

In ‘Application of the Week – WhatsApp Desktop (Part 1)‘ I’ve described how to create a managed package for ‘WhatsApp Desktop‘. In ‘Application of the Week – WhatsApp Desktop (Part 2)‘ I’ve described how to create two scheduled tasks to receive e-mail notifications when WhatsApp Desktop, or any other application for which you’ve created a managed package for, is updated and how to automatically update your managed package(s).

In this blog I will describe how DTAP stages for packages work using the WhatsApp Desktop package as an example. DTAP is the acronym for Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production. It is a rather common acronym in IT expressing a phased approach of software testing and deployment.

Let’s have a look at the stages configuration for DTAP in Liquit Workspace first. After you’ve logged in into Liquit Workspace, choose ‘Portal Settings’ and review the ‘Packages’ section:

You will notice that ‘Development’ and ‘Production’ are mandatory, ‘Test’ and ‘Acceptance’ are optional stages. If you don’t want to use the Test and Acceptance stages, all you have to do here is uncheck the check boxes.

Now, let’s have a look at ‘Releases’ for the managed package for WhatsApp Desktop:

The ‘Name’ column shows the different versions of WhatsApp Desktop within this managed package. Because I’ve used a managed package, this was automatically updated over time as described in part 2, so this feature is very powerful for application and patch life cycle management purposes.

The upper section shows the four DTAP stages. The Development stage contains the latest version which is 0.3.5374, where the Production stage contains the current and latest 0.3.4941 version:

Within ‘Entitlements’ I’ve configured which users, devices and/or groups are entitled for the particular version of WhatsApp Desktop for a particular stage:

When your test users or groups have tested the new version of a managed package, all you need to do to publish the application from the Development phase into Production, or into Test or Acceptance phase if these phases are used too, is to drag and drop the stage from left to right:

You will be enable you to change the name and description, before clicking ‘Confirm’:

Combining the ‘Download and apply updates’ technique described in Part 2 with the stages features described in this blog, you’re able to automatically update your managed package while using DTAP staging techniques.