“What happened with the planned version of Merlin 2.1?” We hear this question again and again. Now that Merlin 2.5 is approaching rapidly, we would like to shed some light on what has transpired over the past few months.

Background:

Originally, Merlin 2.1 was planned to be the “Network Version”. Like any other software development endeavor, we had very valuable and interesting feedback that made its way into the application as features, over 100 of them actually. Of course this pushed our schedule out by a fair bit. Until May/Jun 2007 the plan was to deliver Merlin 2.1 in two versions, Standard and Pro.

Decisions:

After a lot of consideration, we decided that Merlin 2.1 will never see the light. Instead, we will release Merlin 2.5 with all its glory. We scraped the idea of Standard and Pro releases as we wanted all of our clients to benefit and adopt all the new features we worked so hard to put into version 2.5.

As per our upgrade policy, Merlin 2.5 will be a free upgrade to all Merlin 2.0.x users. Merlin 1.0 owners only need buy an upgrade to 2.x series.

We could have released this release as Merlin 3 and charged for the upgrade but we felt that keeping it a free upgrade will expose the entire base of Merlin users to the networking functionality, which we believe to be an essential feature for most Project Managers.

Status:

Now that Merlin 2.5 development is complete, we still have the daunting task of testing a network based application. If all goes well, Merlin 2.5 Beta 1 should be released into the wild by September 14, 2007. Given the complexity and magnitude of work that went into Merlin 2.5, it is very difficult for us to determine an exact date Merlin 2.5.0 will be released. Our driver is quality and not schedule and we are sure you appreciate that.

Until then, we will be posting some Merlin 2.5 teasers.