I have been an Easyworship user for many years and while I understand the reasons behind moving to a subscription model (more dependable revenue stream) I believe there should be certain guarantees that come with it. Such as, [u]at a minimum[/u], annual feature and security updates. Historically EW has had very inconsistent updates and often years in between promised releases. The current release still has issues with PowerPoint that have only been addressed in what is still a beta release. It is nearly time for the next major update to Office and we're still waiting for a fix to the last one. I subscribe to many software packages and I would say that almost all of them adhere to a very regular release cycle. That's what drives the customer base to maintain their subscription. I hope EW can get to a more regular and dependable schedule. I know for me, I would be far more likely to recommend the subscription model to the churches I take care of if I knew they were getting a fair return for that investment.

Hi,

Thanks for posting. This is definitely something we want you to feel comfortable with. The best we can do is provide the history of the last few years. You can check out all of our updates that we released with version 6 and what has been released so far with version 7. Here's the link https://www.easyworship.com/software/whatsnew

While there was a long delay with the time between 2009 and version 6, this is not typical of our development cycle. This was due to a complete rewrite of the software, which could not be avoided in order to provide all the features we are providing now and will be providing in the future. While I cannot provide an exact schedule, as research and development can be unpredictable, I can say that we will continue to release bug fixes and features on a regular basis. Also please note that subscription isn't all about features and bug fixes, but the support that comes along with it.

What about the still-unresolved PowerPoint issue and the 7.1 beta that seems to have been going on for several months now without a proper resolution - when can we expect this to be rolled out? We have been running Office 365 with updates disabled for a long time now in order to allow PowerPoint to work - this cannot be good. Is 7.1 beta stable enough to be used on a main system?

7.1.0 beta fixed this and it's stable. Development gave us a new build yesterday with additional bug fixes along with video playback enhancements for alpha channel video playback. It shouldn't be too much longer before final release.

7.1.0 may have fixed the PPT problem with PPT 2013 and 2016, but it is causing problems with PPT 2010 that aren't there in 7.0.4.1. That means that it hasn't really fixed the problem and it is not stable. Sorry, but this has been proven numerous times.

If you have office 2010, you don't need the beta to overcome the PowerPoint issue introduced by the Microsoft update. You should only need the beta if you have office 365. The in house build we just received for internal testing resolves the office 365 issue and will not break 2010, so the final release will work for office 2010 and 365 versions.

Roger I definitely hope that it does. I was the one who contacted support about the issues with 2010 and offered to test it. Feel free to send a link to that build so that I can test it on our systems that were affected.