ArticlesCertinia Update Process Overview

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How to find more information

Certinia provides videos, documentation and interactive learning options as release materials that allow you to choose how to get up to date with what’s new in Certinia products. Choose from the following options or go to our Help site to get even more specific details.

• Release Webinars - These are split over 3 sessions - FM Cloud, PS Cloud and Foundations lasting approximately one hour each. The sessions provide an overview of the new features being delivered as well as provide insight into our overall roadmap and product vision. After the session the recordings will be available on the Release Hub.
• Release Overview Document - This document goes over each product capability that has been updated and gives a brief summary of the impact.
• Trailhead - A newer asset to the Certinia toolkit. These take you through the highlights of each release and quiz your understanding of the new features.

Certinia is committed to delivering three major updates all focused on addressing customer needs and ever-changing market conditions. The release cadence is outlined below:

Scheduled Update Process

To help customers to stay current on our releases, Certinia pushes updates via a Scheduled Update Process. New customers will be allocated a release schedule, but existing customers will rely on their administrators to follow the steps below to set up push updates.

Return on Investment:

• Sign up to attend monthly feature previews to learn what will be included in upcoming releases and have the opportunity to provide feedback on the features being developed.  
• Attend the Release Overview webinar or visit Release Hub to find out more about what's included in the new release. Be sure to review the Feature List page to see which features need to be enabled as part of the update.

Step 1: Verify Your Product Version

• This can be done one of two ways, either via the System Administration Workspace or manually via Installed Packages. For the System Administration Workspace Method, review our community video here under the “How to Update” section.
• Alternate Method:
  • Open Salesforce and navigate to Setup, find and click on Installed Packages then click the relevant package name (Example: Certinia Accounting).     
  • *Note the Product Version, if the version is prior to Spring 2018 submit a case requesting the update via the Support Hub here in Community, otherwise continue with the following steps.

Step 2: Confirm your Schedule Choices

• Follow the link to Confirm your Schedule Choices or select your schedule choices directly from the System Administrator Workspace.
  • Refresh your Sandbox prior to updating to ensure you have the latest data and configuration for testing.
  • The update will happen 4 weeks ahead of production updates
  • If you don’t currently have access or licences to a Sandbox through Certinia, please talk to your CSM or AE.
  • If you choose schedule 1 for the Spring 22 release, as an example, then you will be auto-enrolled for schedule 1 for Spring 23. If you opt for all 3 releases, you only need to opt into each one once then Certinia will maintain the schedules year on year. 

Step 3: Choose a Sandbox to Update

• You will be asked to provide your Sandbox Org Id, so that a preview update can be pushed automatically. The update will happen 4 weeks ahead of production updates as indicated in the Release Schedule above.

Step 4: Create a User Acceptance Testing Plan

• When your Sandbox is updated you will receive a confirmation message. Once the update is pushed you will have 4 weeks to complete User Acceptance testing before your production environment is updated. Certinia recommends creating a test plan within your business to ensure that all user types/roles can execute their end-to-end processes with the updated functionality and any specific configurations and customizations function correctly. When testing is completed be sure to have a communication plan to share information on the update coming to production.

Step 5: Updates Pushed to Production

• Your production environment will be updated automatically on the date specified by your release schedule above. Send out communications to your users to let them know that the update is live and provide them with links to our Release Hub and Documentation.
  • If needed, you can change your automatic production schedule or cancel the production update via the System Administration workspace

New Release Best Practices

1. Identify a Release Owner - This person will stay up to date on all the latest releases, attending our Feature Previews as well as Release Webinars. They can also be nominated as the primary Push Update contact, so that they are assigned to the cases that are automatically generated when updates are scheduled.  
2. Test - Don’t underestimate the need for testing all steps in your processes. Certinia never expects an update to degrade functionality, but without testing, you may not catch something that would operate differently than you expect.
3. Communicate - There is nothing more frustrating than turning on your system Monday morning and you can’t find the button you used to push every day! Include your Champions and Power Users in UAT and also ensure you communicate to the broader user community all changes.

Learn about Certinia's Scheduled Update process, including expectations and best practices for updating efficiency.