Alpha? Beta?

What do you call a software release when it's not really an alpha or beta release?

I've just updated the "Preview" version of our staff rota/roster software, Oriador Rota.

A couple of months ago we hit upon the idea of releasing a version of the product which would cover the automatic scheduling features we were getting requests for. We knew we could get the core working relatively quickly, but that it would take much longer to perfect. Just as importantly, we knew that making it easy to use and developing a quality interface for all the new features would be a major task.

So, we could keep the new features to ourselves until they were 100% ready, or we could find a way to make them available without affecting the majority of users. Once we reached the stage where we felt the auto-scheduling would work in enough scenarios, we decided that if customers need access to these features, we should make them available.

Internally we called it a beta release, we even called it a beta when talking to some of the customers who were requesting the features. But it's not a beta by any definition I've ever heard! First of all there was no alpha stage, but also, the interface and the feature list aren't even fixed yet. There are still a lot more features on our development schedule for the next version, and the features added so far need to be a lot more friendly for first time users.

Maybe we could have called it an alpha release, but alpha always implies bugs to me, and I'm a developer. I don't know what non-technical users would think of an alpha release, but I don't want anyone to feel apprehensive about trying the software.

So we settled on Preview, and I still think that's the most appropriate name for it.