How do upgrades affect my existing Grand Avenue system?

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 have upgrade testing environments

• Each hosted customer has a dedicated upgrade testing site that is always running the latest released version of Grand Avenue. As part of the software release process, Grand Avenue populates each hosted customer’s upgrade testing site with a current snapshot of that customer’s Production data and then upgrades that data to the new version of Grand Avenue.