Software Maintenance Agreement


Software Maintenance Agreement

ETAP Software Maintenance Agreement (SMA) is the most cost-effective way to protect your ETAP investment including product upgrades and technical support.

ETAP invests thousands of man-hours into each release of its software to provide enhanced capabilities, intelligence, and time-saving features that assist you with your projects.

Extending your software maintenance agreement is crucial to apply ETAP's ever-growing, improvements, unique features, and sophisticated analysis techniques to all your power system analysis projects.

With a valid SMA software maintenance support agreement, you will receive access to ETAP Help Center – ETAP online support & knowledgebase system with a wealth of resources.

  • Free version upgrades including the ability to download the latest releases and service packs
  • Unlimited access to technical support
  • Comprehensive knowledge base, packed with informative articles to empower users with valuable education
  • Get support and stay ahead with prelease equipment library models, ensuring you have access to the most up-to-date library 
  • Access to prerelease and beta versions of new products and upgrades
  • Sessions & panel discussions from ETAP Digital Innovations conference and a chance for you to showcase solutions to industry challenges using ETAP software

Averaging two upgrades per year, ETAP remains the most cutting-edge design, engineering, operation and automation solution on the market today. With each release, ETAP is enhanced with engineering intelligence, optimization features, and automation capabilities to save you time and money.

Contact sma@etap.com or (949) 900-1000 to receive more information on the many
great benefits offered in the ETAP Software Maintenance Agreement Contract.


ETAP File Compatibility

ETAP Files are always forward compatible.  This means that a newer version of ETAP can read any file created with any earlier version of the program. ETAP Files include project databases, engineering device libraries, equipment warehouses, graphical visualization themes, engineering rulebooks, data exchange interfaces and many more.

With each release, ETAP is enhanced with engineering intelligence, optimization features, and automation capabilities to save you time and money. These enhancements are developed throughout the software ecosystem and help simplify the complex nature of the ever-evolving electric power & digital software industry.

We strive to maintain forward compatibility from older releases of ETAP to the latest versions. With the latest version of ETAP, you can open any ETAP File created by any other ETAP user from version 19 and higher. For older ETAP File versions, you may still be able to open the project using the latest ETAP release, but this ETAP File transition is not supported under the ETAP Software Maintenance Agreement Contract.

We highly recommend that our customers continue to migrate and use the latest version of the software, not only to take advantage of ETAP File compatibility but also to leverage the latest software innovations and access engineering support from a team of power engineering experts who passionately deliver those innovations release after release.

Reminders

  • ETAP automatically backs up the older version of the ETAP project databases, warehouse, rulebooks, and engineering libraries. The backup files are located in the folder they were accessed from, or a folder labeled ‘backup.’
  • If you transfer files between different locations and systems or computers, make sure they are running the same ETAP version and release, ideally the latest version.
  • Backwards compatibility is not supported to ensure there is no loss of data when opening new project files in older versions and to preserve data transformation integrity. If you decide to use an older version of ETAP, you will need to manually re-enter the data you have added to the upgraded or converted file into the old backup file.