+1
And support all the same features as the customer paid version - how on earth we can otherwise build and test the other functionalities?!
Or, to be fair - let them in some way resemble the index of the customer you're working on. That way, you have real limits that will apply to you in production as well. Forces you to think about those limits if necessary early, but doesn't limit you to do stuff you need to if your customer has a large license. (So you basically also force the customer to think about the license type early).
+1 I have to say I agree with this.
I know there were some really good improvements to the Find development provision last year, but I still think there is a gap.
EPiServer have made really good strides with frequent releases and supporting developers, based on the understanding that a good development experience is a vital part of a successful integration. I wonder whether the Find licensingmodel could also be improved further to support this.
How about every Find license actually gives you two identical indexes (one for Production use and one for development). At the minute you have to purchase separate add-on indexes to support development. My guess is there are a lot of development environments that are running from demo licenses or even sharing indexes across environments, which is messy andmakes it very difficult to truly validate functionality.
Scenarios
--
LIVE site - Customer purchases one FIND index - one identical free index is given for dev usage.
LIVE site and STAGING - Customer purchases two FIND indexes, two identical indexes are given for DEV usage.
This might even remove the need for additional indexes as a separate line item.
You'd have to find a way to ensure DEV indexes were only used for DEV purposes. Perhaps a more stringent and lower rate limit is the answer here.
Mark, great points.
I think that when buying a live licens now always gives two index, one for live site and one for Stage/Test-site.
I use maby three or four developer index for one site because I usually create a branch for every new function and when it need to change anything in the index, I create a new index to be used in that branch. So I like it to more be that we developers could create a new developer index from the live index and get the same settings out of the box.
...when working with completely different things, one might do saving and editing of content. So when Find throws exception because the index is full, that is a major annoyance during development. And it forces me to spend hours on non issues.
Do let the developer indexes be near limitless (or at least far more than a not-so-big number of documents).