Silverlight

We are currently running version 4.0.5 of Silverlight and have over 150 users who are uploading content into the site.  When these users attempt to upload documents or images, they are asked to upgrade to the newest version of Silverlight.

Currently, most of our users are not local admins on their machines and do not have the rights to add plugins and applications to their computers.  Many are not able to go to the Silverlight site and upgrade.  As a result this is pushed out through group policy to computers.  We also have some other applications that are using Silverlight and go through a testing period with new versions in order to maintain compatibility with that software.

Will Sitefinity always require the newest version of Silverlight?  Any time I need to upgrade it I will have to present a request to our IT Change Control Board to justify it, have our Desktop Managers perform a two-week testing to ensure compatibility with other systems, and then wait for the next update to be pushed to all computers.  By this time, I may be starting the process over again if Sitefinity has released another quarterly update or SP.  Our IT management has told me they would not be open to updating Silverlight more than 1 time per year unless of a security fix, or a major upgrade (such as 4.0.6 to 5)

Is it possible to know in advance if a update will require an update to Silverlight.  If it does I may not be able to install it as soon as I would like, if at all.  This would really create problems if updates must be done sequentially as I could possibly do 3 updates at once, and as a result have to test all areas of my site in three versions at once.  If I just apply all 3 updates without testing and something is messed up...I would have no idea where to start looking for the cause.

Ideally Sitefinity would be able to operate with older versions of Silverlight as well, even if users are prompted to update their version they would have the option not to.

Any ideas from Telerik on how to deal with this?  We will also be turning our 70+ sud-domain sites using Sitefinity, so our number of users could jump as high as 600.

Hello Anthony,

Silverlight controls used at Sitefinity are instantiated with  param "autoupgrade" equal to false and minRuntimeVersion equals to "4.0.50401.0" 


<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2"  width="500" height="500">
            <param name="source" value="blank.xap" />
            
            <param name="onload" value="onSilverlightLoad" />
            <param name="onerror" value="onSilverlightError" />                                    
            
            <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" />
            <param name="autoUpgrade" value="false" />
        </object>

The autoUpgrade parameter is set to false in order user to have own upgrade experience(in case of minruntimeversion is correct.)