Akeneo 1.4 – Update checker and usage statistics

Let’s start with a small but important one : the update checker.

As you might know, we have a current release cycle of two new minor versions (Akeneo 1.x) per year. Akeneo 1.3 has been released in March 2015, Akeneo 1.4 in September 2015 and you can expect a 1.5 version in February 2016. Each minor version comes with a bunch of improvements and new features. We believe that it’s currently a good rhythm to improve our product without requiring too frequent upgrade work for our community.

But – if waiting for 6 months for a new feature sounds reasonable – it’s far too long when it’s about getting some important bug fixes. That’s why we are also releasing more frequently some patch versions (Akeneo 1.4.x). As we are trying to never introduce any backward compatibility breaks on those versions, the upgrade process is really straight forward  – even on already live installations. But it can still be difficult to know when a new patch is available. That’s why we added an update checker allowing you to be notified directly from the Akeneo dashboard when a new upgrade is available! Technically speaking this means that your Akeneo installation is now sending a request to one of our server to check if new updates are available.

This update checker also allows us to collect some anonymous usage statistics. As we want to be fully transparent on this topic, here is a few more details about what this checker is actually doing.

What data are we collecting :

Actually we are collecting only a few stats about your installation :

• Current edition (CE or EE) & version used (which is useful if we want to tell you if you are up to date!)
• Number of products in your catalog
• Number of attributes, families, channels and locales
• Number of users
• Storage used (MySQL or MongoDB)
• OS and browser

We are not (and will never be) collecting any product information stored in your Akeneo installation!

Why do we need this data :

As an open source and on premise software it’s very difficult for us to get some insights about how people are really using Akeneo PIM. To be able to continue to improve the product and to prioritize our new features stream, we need to get a clearer view on what is a standard use case for Akeneo. For instance, getting more details about the average number of products per installation can be really helpful to define what exactly is a large catalog (10K products? 100K? 1M …) for our users and to adapt our roadmap and tests accordingly.

Those statistics are – of course – for internal purpose ONLY.

Can I deactivate this update checker ? :

YES – If you don’t need to be notified for new updates or if you don’t want to send those usage statistics to Akeneo, you can simply go to System > Configuration and uncheck the “New versions notification” option into the “Notifications” section.

We hope you will enjoy this new feature and will be pleased to answer any question you have about this update checker in the comments section! And if you want to learn more about Akeneo 1.4, don’t forget to register to our webinar on October 21st!