Many customers new to SaaS must realize the importance of keeping their SaaS environments current. Certinia provides three updates each year (Winter, Spring, and Summer), and in this blog post, we want to discuss the top five reasons why you should invest the time and effort to stay current and the best practices for doing the same.

Benefits of staying up to date:

Access new features / functionality

Regular updates often introduce new features and functionality that can optimize your workflow and provide a competitive edge. However, keeping up with updates may mean missing valuable tools that could significantly boost your team's productivity. Also, you're already paying to access your subscription's latest features and functionality, so why not take advantage of them?

Technical debt snowballs

Technical debt is a term used to describe the mounting cost of not staying up to date and addressing problems in your environment. Left unchecked, technical debt will snowball and become increasingly difficult to manage. One way to limit your technical debt is to keep your environment on or close to the most current release. When you stay current, future updates are incremental and more accessible to perform. Also, when you stay current, many other customers will be upgrading simultaneously, so any issues encountered are at the top of your mind and will be quickly addressed by the software vendor. On the other end of the spectrum, we recently helped a new customer over eight years behind in updates; that's 20+ releases! They were being forced to upgrade because their antiquated software version would no longer be supported. Getting them upgraded to the most recent release was a significant and costly undertaking, involving many weeks of planning and numerous consultations with various stakeholders.

Bug fixes and performance enhancement

No software is perfect, and bugs are inevitable in the development process. SaaS providers actively work to identify and rectify these bugs through updates. By keeping your software up to date, you benefit from bug fixes and enjoy performance improvements that can enhance the overall efficiency and user experience.

Training & Adoption

Keeping up to date on new features and functionality is more straightforward in 'bite-size chunks.' If you sit out a number of releases, the amount of change that you encounter when you finally upgrade can be overwhelming to even your most experienced users, negatively impacting adoption. The transition from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, anyone?

Compliance & Legal

Keeping your software up to date is crucial for businesses striving to maintain compliance with various ever-changing government and industry regulations. This protects your organization from potential legal implications and builds trust with clients and partners who value security and compliance. For example, ASC-606 Revenue Recognition changes required an update to be properly addressed.

Best Practices for keeping current:

Assign an owner

Assign someone on your team (or a trusted partner) to stay educated on the latest features and own the upgrade process. When no one owns upgrades, they will get done once they become too scary to contemplate, and no one will want to own them!

Attend release previews

Certinia and many other software vendors offer release previews that showcase upcoming functionality. Attend these previews to learn about upcoming releases' new features and functionality. Use this knowledge to map out the upgrade plan for your environment.

Develop reusable test scripts

Each environment is different and requires a unique test plan. Create reusable test scripts that you can utilize when testing each new release. Test all of your critical path processes end to end. Pay special attention to testing any customizations you may have in your environment and to customize page layouts, which often get overwritten when you upgrade.

Upgrade Sandbox first

It's always advisable to upgrade Sandbox first and test in Sandbox before you deploy to Production. Pay attention to any required post-upgrade steps called out in the documentation and make sure these are not missed.

Upgrade (at least) annually

You don't have to adopt every new release immediately when it becomes available. In fact, there is a strong argument to stay 'one release behind' if the new features being offered in the current release aren't 'must-haves' for your organization. However, you should upgrade at least annually to keep things manageable and benefit from new features and functionality that you're already paying for!