We are excited to announce that Greentree International have introduced a new option for upgrading your Greentree system.  There are 2 main ideas behind this improvement;

1. Greentree sites, especially those with payroll, will be able to apply fixes for introduced bugs to their system, rather than having to wait for the release of a Major Certified pack.

2. It’s now possible to apply a patch to your system which reduces the risk of introducing any new issues.  A patch includes just fixes to issues rather than fixes and Greentree enhancements.

The way the upgrade process works is now in line with Endeavour’s best practice.  Here’s how it works, a Major certified pack is  released about 4 times a year.  Between each Major pack there are minor packs released, these minor packs include enhancements and fixes and are released frequently.  Historically, some customers could not use minor packages as they were not Payroll certified or the pack had features requiring testing that was time consuming and expensive.

Now the minor packages will still be released as before however there is also the new option of applying a patch.  The patch will only contain fixes rather than enhancements, it will be certified against Payroll and won’t contain any database changes.  Greentree will evaluate the fix to ensure it is low risk for retro-fitting to the last Major package released. Our intention is to generally use the Major packages and only use the minor packages & patches when absolutely necessary.

Key Benefits:

• Increases stability of certified packages.
• Lowers the risk for customers upgrading to a certified packages.
• Certified Major packages are released four times per year allowing customers to better plan their upgrade schedules.

If an introduced issue is detected following the release of a Major certified package, it will almost always be resolved by the release of a patch, there may be some rare circumstances where this is not possible due to database changes or other structural limitations.

We are very excited to be able to deliver this improved process and believe it will work very well with our upgrade methodology. We all share the risk of issues going unnoticed during testing of the upgrades and now we can get fixes applied without the need to go through system full testing again. There will always be exceptions to the rule but we believe this new process will improve the upgrade process even further. We will adopt these new methods without you needing to take any action.

If you have any questions please contact your Account Manager.

Regards

The Endeavour Team