Thank you for voicing your concern, Ingo.
It’s not my job to say if you’re right or wrong, but I welcome the discussion. I think ELTS can be both a curse and a blessing, and prolonging them can both save or ruin a client relationship.
I might be asking some stupid questions here, but please bear with me. I don’t work for an agency that is a big ELTS user, so to this is a topic I don’t know much about. The decision to prolong is not mine to make either.
I wonder if this is potentially about more than just ELTS. Allow me to try to lift the question up to a higher level:
Granted, some clients will always upgrade and others will never. But for the rest of them: What is lacking in our (the entire TYPO3 community’s) long-term strategic conversation with the clients that makes some of them choose a 5, 6, 7 year-old software version over an upgrade?
What can the TYPO3 Association and TYPO3 Company do? Should we help agencies communicate the benefits of an upgrade? Should we communicate more directly with agencies’ clients? Are we undecommunicating the financial requirements of site maintenance?
How can we together make more clients upgrade earlier — long before the normal three-year ELTS expires?
Best wishes
Mathias Bolt Lesniak
TYPO3 Association Board Member