As I am not an employee of Limesurvey GmbH, these are unofficial answers based on what I (think to?) know and common sense:
- Will ConfortUpdate work for non-LTS editions?
Here I am sure: Yes, it works also with non-LTS editions. The part about 2.06 LTS is still there because this LTS was only available to paying customers back in the days. Today this version isn't really that relevant anymore. Currently I would only use the LS3 LTS for productive work, given that LS4 (despite being labelled as "stable") still has a lot of bugs and "hickups". Install it as a test environment to be familiar with it when you make the switch and also to find and report bugs so it will become "stable-stable".
- Does it provide any warning/info about potential extension/plugin incompatibility?
Not sure, never had any warning there. But, I think there is no warning. Because LS doesn't really know which kind of plugins/extensions you have installed and many of them are custom anyway. So it would be difficult to determine if a plugin from external sources is compatible or not.
- How is technical support going to be delivered? Ticket system? Mail? Phone?
I assume that you have seen that the support is ONLY for the Comfort Update feature. With the CE version, all other things are your own responsibility, as your installation is installed on your own server, etc. You are
I mean, for less than 10 Euros a month it is not very realistic to get custom support for a LS installation on your own server. The hourly rate of a support technician is probably a lot higher than that.
As you can see in the table, the only difference between the different Surveyor Premium packages for Limesurvey CE are:
- Access to Legacy and LTS versions (the LTS version part is a little outdated, because afaik you can download LS 3 LTS without a Surveyor Premium package.
- Access to premium designs (not sure which premium designs there are)
- Technical support for the comfort update feature (rest is on you or the person that installs LS for you, though I am sure that you can hire them or any official partner on an hourly basis. But for third party extensions / themes it will probably take quite a lot of time for someone unfamiliar with the code to get into it and fix anything, so you'd probably rather go to the person that developed it in the first place. They should know their code best.
- And of course, you get the comfort update. I think for 10 Euros per month this is actually a pretty good value, considering that you will save yourself time with the updates compared to manual updates or money if you hire someone to do the updates for you. Of course you can always do manual updates, this has been done for years now and some people still do it. But given the price, I think it is work to have comfort update. It keeps the hurdle of updating low, because it generally only takes a couple of minutes to click through the process. So the chances that you do regular updates is higher and you also get alerted about available updates. All in all, Comfort Update is not necessary, but it does what its name says: it gives you more comfort. And I think we all have quite a bit on our table so that anything helps. AND it also helps to keep Limesurvey alive. The developers have to survive somehow as well.
I have no idea if you can get support via telephone, but I think ticket and email is the way to go.
- Does Technical support cover upgrade incompatibility issues with custom designs and/or common extensions?
thanks for your help!
I highly doubt that the technical support will be able to help you with incompatibility issues for custom designs and third party extensions. How should this work? These incompatibilities need to be discussed with the creators of these things.
But in general, there are usually no changes to the extension and template system within one major release. But for example there is a break between LS3 and LS4 in terms of templates. So your LS3 custom templates/themes won't work in LS4. It is your responsibility to adapt your custom themes.
Of course, if the problem is caused by a bug in the update, than you can create a bug report and I am sure they'll be working on it. Ideally, in these cases, you should also create a bug ticket, which probably will speed up the fix, as you would be a paying customer.