It Makes For Easier Upgrades

UA is a strategic platform for the deployment of social enterprise services to an agency's clients.

• Universal Access is a platform – it provides a set of APIs and extension points that can be used to build out a solution that suits the needs of individual customers.
• Universal Access is strategic – from the outset it has been built with upgrade concerns in mind. The goal is that upgrades are simple and each one brings in a host of new backward compatible features.

The second point is a key tenet of the Universal Access design philosophy: By using and extending Universal Access in the recommended ways, you can take on new versions with minimal effort and in doing so take advantage of all the new features offered through upgrades. If customers stray outside of the recommended guidelines set out in this document, then there is an increased risk of running into difficulties during an upgrade.