Cisco Policy or best practice related to updating to latest SU

[Shalid Kurunnan Chalil]

Dear Experts, 

Could you please let me know what is the best practice from Cisco or what you guys are following related to the SU (Engineering updates) releases of the Cisco call manager or any other cisco UC products?

I observed that engineers including myself tend to install the latest SU when we hit on any issues or bugs? so just thought to get your view on the topic. 

Appreciated your support in advance. 

Regards,

Shalid

[Roger Kallberg]

We would normally run any new SU releases in our pre-production environment for some time to see if it runs without issues. Then after 4-6 weeks we’d plan for the upgrade of our global system landscape that runs in DCs in 3 geographic areas and have a SME to connect them.

[Adam Pawlowski]

The usual process for us is to review release notes and related caveats. Often we are waiting for a SU for a feature, or for a bug fix that's included.

After review, it gets installed in pre-production or lab, features tested as needed, then rolled out during the next quarterly maintenance window to production.

We no longer subscribe to the theory of only upgrading once you've found a bug, with regard to SU anyway. Device Packs want current SUs, bugs and behavioral changes can be included. Proceeding forward multiple service releases at once means more work, so why not keep up on it?