Upgrade Process

FastTrack’s product release strategy is broken into three categories of releases:

1. Enhancement Releases

2. Service Patch – Planned Maintenance Release

3. Service Patch – Un-planned Hotfix Release

On average there are 2 planned Enhancement Releases per annum, Planned Service Patch Maintenance will be released as required to address software bugs and Unplanned Service Patch Hotfixes are released when severity one issues are raised that requires immediate attention

FastTrack undertakes a controlled process for releasing upgrades into customers’ environment. It’s important to note that all clients have their own controlled environment on shared infrastructure which allows FastTrack to manage the rollout of any upgrade based on an defined schedule.  No upgrade is released without completion of the SDLC (Software Development life Cycle) including Development, Testing, ALPHA and BETA phases. 

The IT Operations Team manages the coordination and deployment of FastTrack360 new environments and upgrades to new release versions within FTCloud. The release of a new version of any of the above types of releases follows the below steps:

• The commercial release of the product will be exposed to customers via two channels:

  • The FTA (FastTrack Administrator) communications, email, channel outlining the scope of the releases and release timings.

  • In product messaging to all users advising of the release schedule and new features.

• Optional UAT – User Acceptance Testing

  • FastTrack’s preference is to directly upgrade customers into production with the latest release. All releases have gone through a rigorous BETA program where the software is validated in both testing and production environments with a customer representative group before it’s made commercially available to all customers.

  • If a customer requests the release to be applied to a controlled UAT environment and the customer does not have a funded UAT environment, they may request a temporary environment which will have hosting costs. Please speak to your Account Manager if you have this requirement.

• Production Upgrade:

  • FastTrack will schedule customers into groups to apply the upgrade to all customers, that typically spans a period of 3-4 weeks. The upgrade dates are communicated to each group of customers and are commonly scheduled for;

    • APAC Thursday/Friday evening from 8-12pm AEST

    • UK - Mondays 11-1am GMT.

  • Please Note: If a customer requests the upgrade to be applied at a time outside of the pre-arrange timeslots upgrade changes will apply.

• The customer will need to plan and coordinate any end user education, manage any change to processes and plan any configuration changes to be applied post the upgrade and prior to commencement of operational usage.

• FastTrack will apply the upgrade, run some post upgrade sanity checks on each environment and then communicate to the customers on completion.