As a reminder – starting with QuickBooks 2013 R6 you may see some additional information in the product information window (when you press F2) that looks very different than what we are used to – instead of just saying something like “Release R6P”, now you may see something longer:
Since my installation of the R6 update didn’t show this notation initially, but later did, I speculated that Intuit had already pushed out a “critical fix”. And since I saw this in some installations but not others, I also speculated that there were fixes being pushed out for some versions of QuickBooks and not others. Well, I was wrong.
I would like to thank Kim, Alex and Saurabh for pointing out my inaccuracies and providing updated information.
So, what do these numbers mean?
- QuickBooks will “open a channel” that connects your desktop program with Intuit. Once this “channel” is established, you will see this notation. Initially, it doesn’t mean that a critical fix has been installed, just that the “channel” is established.
- The notation represents the date of the critical fix. So “U(121026B)” represents the October 26, 2012 baseline (“placeholder”) date – just a notation that the channel is established. No fix was pushed as a part of this notation. If a critical fix goes out, the notation will have the date of the release of the fix.
- New installations might not show this right away, as it might take a few days for the connection to be established.
What questions do I still have?
- Do you have to have the “automatic update” feature enabled for critical fixes to come through, or will it happen anyways? I haven’t done any testing of this so I can’t tell if the “channel” is opened without you being able to control it. I do have some concerns about this feature if we don’t have a way of controlling it through the automatic update settings.
- How do I install a critical fix manually? In larger multi-user installations I often have automatic updates turned off, because it can create significant problems if one user installs an update at the wrong time (like, just as we are about to print payroll checks) or if one user updates while others do not. In this situation, how to I manually install a critical fix? With regular releases I can download a manual patch.
- How will we know what the “critical fixes” are? If I notice that there has been an update pushed out, how will I know what the changes are? It is important to me to know what is going on with my installation!
- How does this differ from the “off-cycle update” feature that Intuit already has? They’ve been pushing little updates out to QuickBooks without notifying us in the past, so what is different here?
There are some good aspects to this. The major revisions (the R-level notation) take time to implement, and sometimes Intuit wants to get a small fix out more quickly. For example, what if Microsoft pushes out an update to Windows (such as to the .NET Framework that programs like QuickBooks use) that causes some feature to fail in QuickBooks. Intuit could use this new “critical fix” feature to push out a fix for that rather than having to wait for the next major revision, which might take months. Patches like a fix for the Scan Manager problem in Windows 8 installations, or some of the crashing problems that were plaguing people with earlier 2013 revisions.
All in all, I’m OK with their having this ability, but I would like to have better control and notification than what I think I’m seeing (and perhaps I’ll hear more about this later).
