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What is an Upgrade?
A perfect place to start is identifying exactly what an upgrade is, an upgrade involves the advancement of our products by adding new features, functionality, or capabilities. Pricefx is an agile tool that is constantly evolving. This means that we try to fix issues and provide the latest functionality available to your solution as quickly as possible. The process to ensure you have access to the latest and greatest in pricing software is through upgrading to new versions of Pricefx we continuously release. There are 2 types of releases:
Major Releases. These happen every six months around January and June every year. The major releases contain big new features and brand-new functionality that expand our product with industry-defining features (ie. Sales Compensation, Optimization, etc). These have specific names and are numbered with the first digit (ie. Godfather 8.x, Hurricane 9.x, Bee Knees 10.x, etc.)
Minor Releases (Patches). These releases happen every month between major releases and contain quick fixes and small new functionality. The way we name these patches is with the “decimal” in the version description. As an example, for Hurricane, we have had 9.0 (major release), 9.1 (first patch of Hurricane), 9.2 (second patch of Hurricane).
What
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Will Be Impacted by an
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Upgrade?
When an upgrade is applied, it is important to know that it is your Pricefx cluster that is impacted and not your partitions. This means that the application of an upgrade will cause all the partitions in that cluster to be updated simultaneously. For example, if your QA Cluster has both QA and DEV partitions, they both will get updated at the same time.
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LEARN MORE: Learn all of the new features in our latest release here. |
As a best practice, Pricefx recommends the following sequence:
Upgrading QA Cluster (+ all associated partitions)
Perform intensive QA Cluster testing across complete functionality
Evaluate the results of upgrade acceptance testing, resolve any issues
Upgrade PROD Cluster
Perform intensive PROD Cluster testing across complete functionality
Identify issues and notify Pricefx Support as needed
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LEARN MORE: Learn more about use of Partition Copy in Pricefx, and how it is commonly used for go-live preparations, QA purposes, training, and demo purposes. Click here. |
Why Should I Upgrade?
Our product is constantly evolving as improvements and advancements in our core product are applied in support of our customer's and industry’s needs. We are constantly listening to our customers to fully understand their pricing environment, learn about their issues, and identify the opportunities they provide for further innovation. Within the product team, these new features are reviewed for impact on customer value, developed along key value drivers, beta tested, revised, and improved, and then finally become part of a major release.
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Risk. When version upgrades are not being performed, then there is the risk of falling too far behind and not having the ability to take advantage of our most advanced capabilities.
How
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Do I
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Prepare for an
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Upgrade?
Pricefx has prepared a checklist of tasks that provides a guide that customers can follow to help them prepare their environment for a release upgrade. Before beginning our upgrade, there are several important concepts that should be known:
Shared vs Private Environment. In Pricefx we offer two types of environments, Shared and Private environments where your solution is developed and held. Shared environments will upgrade automatically on the date of release for all Major and Minor releases. For customers in Private instances, then the upgrade is an on-demand process.
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NOTE: The Shared environment option has the capability to use the Pricefx Shared Staging cluster for their QA partition, and the shared cluster is updated about one month prior to a Major release and 1 week before a Minor release.
Release Notes. With each Major or Minor release, Pricefx will publish a set of release notes that provide a comprehensive view of the upcoming release. During a customer’s preparation process, It is a good practice to review these notes to have an understanding of the new features being released, and also to comprehend what areas of an existing implementation will be impacted. Having a good understanding of the depth and breadth of the release will assist in your upgrade planning,
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LEARN MORE: You can view the complete set of release notes here. |
Upgrade Components
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Before starting our upgrade, we should consider the impact of the following:
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Ensure that the team of selected testers has the necessary time to perform the test cases assigned to them due to the volume of their other work. Without the proper time allocation to fulfill your upgrade test plan in its entirety will inevitably to undiscovered gaps in the upgrade preparation.
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If upgrade issues are NOT discovered and resolved before an upgrade is applied, then the production application might be impacted and become temporarily unavailable until resolved.
What
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Are the
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Steps for a
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Successful Upgrade?
Pricefx recommends the following checklist as a starting point for the upgrade migration plan:
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-Use proper data selection for testing to ensure we have both positive and negative outcomes, and we are testing for specific scenarios.
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We highly recommend having your Internal IT team standing by during your QA testing as well as during, and immediately after, the upgrade of your production instance. Trivial IT issues such as browser cache and add-blockers do occur and need to be routed and resolved by your IT specialists for a smooth GoLive experience.
Prioritization of Test Cases
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As the upgrade testing progresses, and various issues are discovered, these errors need to be logged so fixes can be applied and then re-tested. Any errors discovered should be prioritized using the following suggested set of categories:
Priority | Explanation |
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CRITICAL | User is unable to use the solution, resulting in a critical impact on business operations. This condition requires immediate resolution. (ie. The system is down) |
HIGH | Any high priority defect which results in an incorrect price calculation. No workaround is available, and the defect is time sensitive. (ie. Defect is blocking pricing from being exported to ERP systems) |
MEDIUM | The defect requires attention but does not block pricing utilization. A workaround is available but may not be optimal. (ie,. Defect requires the user to perform manual calculations) |
LOW | Minor loss of functionality. These may be monitoring issues, clarifications, documentation questions; or administrative tasks. (ie. Update the column label or any other cosmetic related defects) |
Each of our testers should be logging their results every day. If an issue is discovered, then the appropriate level of documentation to assist in fixing the issue should be provided (ie. expected vs actual result, error messages, screenshots, etc).
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LEARN MORE: To learn more about resolutions to common issues related to Pricefx upgrades, you can click here. |
When
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Should I
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Upgrade?
Ideally, your partitions should be up to date in regard to the Pricefx release policy of N-1. Therefore, this means that customers should prepare for upgrades once per year (2 times per year is best) to align with Pricefx’s best practice recommendation to remain at the most only one major release behind.
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LEARN MORE: For information on the Pricefx upgrade release schedule, you can view the release calendar here. |
Regarding the timing of your upgrade, there are two things to keep in mind:
Each major release will contain a range of upgrades:
New Modules or Capabilities that are extensions to our core product that provide completely new features and functions that complement our existing product mix. As an example, review the information on /wiki/spaces/KB4ACC/pages/3902472287 Sales Compensation that was released in Hurricane 9.0.
Updates and upgrades to existing core capabilities that extend an existing feature by providing expanded functionality. As an example, review information on Visual Configuration released in Bees Knees 10.0.
Patches to the underlying core product that resolves issues impacting our customers and is limited to specific capabilities or features. Generally, these are released as minor upgrades (ie.10.1, 10.2, etc.) with each successive minor release considered more stable with expanded functionality versus any earlier versions.
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The importance of Patch upgrades can’t be overstated, they can be used to apply additional security to your application.
How
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Do I
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Request an
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Upgrade?
Pricefx tries to make the upgrade process as seamless as possible from the request and actual upgrade procedure side. For customers that are running in a Private Environment, then we have two ways to request an upgrade, the first one through Platform Manager is the most desired one:
Platform Manager. In Platform Manager, we have created a section where any user with the right user role* can request an upgrade of a specific cluster. You must go to the account tab, click on “Upgrade” and then select the cluster, the version you want to upgrade to, and the date and time you decided. You can also add some comments and contacts you want to notify about this upgrade. As soon as it has been requested, you will get an invite in your calendar to track the upgrade window.
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LEARN MORE: To learn how to request your upgrade through |
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PlatformManager, click here. |
Support ticket. In case there is an issue with the previous procedure, you can also navigate to the Support Desk, create a ticket with the category “Cluster upgrade” and add the information required with a desired date and time. If we cannot perform the upgrade in that timeframe, we will come back to you with a new proposed time.
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LEARN MORE: To learn how to request your upgrade through a Support ticket, click here. |
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If you have implemented your Pricefx solution in a Shared Environment, then all major and minor release upgrades are applied automatically to your QA environment.
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Upgrade Time Allocation
When upgrading to a Major Release (ie. 9.x to 10.x), you should allocate about 4 hours for the upgrade to complete successfully. You will want to plan ahead for this time window to minimize the impact on your business operations. Minor upgrades and Patches could be as quick as 5 minutes.
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