FlowBreeze 2.0 was released a week ago. Very quietly. No formal announcemnent was made on the site. No press release was sent out. No current users were notified. I admit, it’s kind of a strange way of launching a major revision, but I had my reasons.

The biggest issue was testing. With 4 Microsoft Office versions, 3 Windows versions, and varying levels of user permissions, I felt the likelihood of a few bugs going undetected in testing was high. There isn’t much difference between Excel 2002(XP) and Excel 2003. But the jumps from Excel 2000 to XP and 2003 to 2007 are significant. Over time, I’ve seen permutations of all the possible the OS/Office combinations (except Office 2007 on Windows 2000). And they all have their quirks.

So in order to avoid getting a thousand emails pointing to the same bug, the release was purposely done quietly.

It turns out there were a number of issues that weren’t found in-house or by the handful of beta testers. I jumped on each one as the reports came in. So last week there were multiple updates posted daily. This weekend the last remaining issues on the list were tackled, and a new version was posted this morning.

With all the reported issues resolved, I will turn my attention toward getting a formal release package out, and send out product update notifications to all existing users. Overall, I’m happy with the way that this release has gone. Had I done it the other way around, I would have had to spend as much time answering emails as I did fixing the bugs and getting quick turn updates posted.

The “official” announcement, including a few major product changes, will be made soon.