Once you have your escrow agreement in place and the initial deposit is made, you usually cannot just sit back and forget it. Very rare is the case where an escrow deposit is a static, never-changing item (but there are cases).
Most commonly, software products evolve and change from time to time and when this happens, a copy should be sent to us. As a matter of best practices, we stipulate these updates in both our Single-User and Multi-User escrow agreements. And, we normally retain the initial deposit and all updates so we have a complete anthology of a product over time.
This makes sense for all parties to the escrow. We have had real cases where panicked developers called, asking if they still had an escrow account with us and whether we had a copy (any copy) of their code, because their own backup and disaster recovery devices had failed. On the flipside, we’ve seen cases where for whatever the reason, a particular beneficiary was running an outdated version of the software and the developer authorized us to send a copy of “Version Dot-Old” to the client.
We understand that one of the last things your IT staff cares to get bogged down with is preparing an escrow deposit or update every time there’s a new release or version available to the client. Burning CDs or DVDs and preparing FedEx packages for escrow, while sufficient and still done by some of our clients, is time consuming. And as far as the development team is concerned, creating new products or tweaking existing ones is much more fun and profitable anyway.
Today, most of our developer clients use our Client Tools to submit secure FTP deposits and updates. At the FTP Page, clients fill out a brief form identifying themselves and the product, and upload the entire deposit in a Zip folder. Our server automatically puts a 1024-bit encryption key on the folder as it’s uploaded, and notifies us of the update (for details, visit our Security page).
Once the escrow deposit or update is processed, we then send email confirming and describing the update to all of the parties to the escrow agreement.
Software escrow deposits and updates have never been easier!
