Part of Grand Avenue’s overall strategy is to minimize the impact of upgrades to existing installations. At a high level:
Data is preserved
Quality records are never deleted
When existing data requires modification
The scope of the changes is described in the release notes
All changes to an item’s data are recorded in its audit trail
Database Upgrade Notification tasks are created for changes requiring customer review
When new data fields or configuration settings are added, the default values are identified in the release notes
Open process items resume their respective workflows, picking up at the same step where they left off prior to the upgrade
To the extent possible, existing system behavior is maintained
New features with significant impact to quality system processes, documentation, or user training are generally disabled or configured to maintain existing behavior and must be enabled by configuration settings as documented in the release notes
Hosted customers may review all software changes in their upgrade testing environments
Each hosted customer has a dedicated Grand Avenue environment for evaluating the impact of software upgrades. Before every Grand Avenue release, Upgrade testing sites are populated with a snapshot of the hosted customer’s Production data and then upgraded to the new version of Grand Avenue. For information on accessing hosted upgrade testing environments, customers may contact support@grandavenue.com.