What's the best method/tool to handle/track multiple clients with multiple different release versions of different applications?
19:25 02 Dec 2025

My (quite small) organisation has multiple applications it manually deploys to customers; some of which integrate with each other.
For various reasons, customers don't upgrade application versions unless they need it, either. However, no customer is 'forked', they're all just on different iterations of the trunk.

e.g. client Foo has applications Av2 , Bv1, Cv3.
Client Bar has applications Av3 and Cv3 but doesn't need B at all.
Client Baz only uses Bv2

Is there a best practice (or best way to use an existing vendor's tools e.g. Jira, airtable) to handle being able to record and look these up easily?
As is, best I have is essentially a four-table mini-database (or implementable as just a four-tab spreadsheet) -
- Clients
- Products
- Product version with changelog and date of each change
- Deployment table, with a record for every deployment, with link to client, which product, what version it was updated to, and the installation log

I've tried looking around but a lot of existing solutions either seem to assume all customers are being updated to the production version (or one single application), or that I'm forking for each client.

Best practice is probably implementing an auto-update system, but in the interim, what's the best practice/tooling for what I have right now?

version release-management