Upgrades

General Information

Next Upgrade Date

The next upgrade is scheduled for July 20 2023.

Quarterly Upgrades

Upgrades are now released on a quarterly basis.

Key reasons for changing to a quarterly upgrade approach include:

• This upgrade period will bring more enhancements that will make your SmartSimple system more robust with more and better features.
• We are well into the process of becoming Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) compliant. This process requires more in depth testing and review of our work to meet a higher level of compliance. Better security standards mean a more secure platform for all our users.

Upgrade Schedule

Upgrade	Key Release Date	Global Release Date
November 2024	Thu, Nov 14 2024	Thu, Nov 28 2024
February 2025	Thu, Feb 13 2025	Thu, Feb 27 2025
June 2025	Thu, Jun 12 2025	Thu, Jun 26 2025
October 2025	Thu, Oct 9 2025	Thu, Oct 23 2025
February 2026	Thu, Feb 12 2026	Thu, Feb 26 2026
June 2026	Thu, Jun 11 2026	Thu, Jun 25 2026
October 2026	Thu, Oct 8 2026	Thu, Oct 22 2026

We regularly update the list of upgrade features and schedule for both the backup and production servers on this Wiki page.

This page will provide a general overview of each upgrade, with links to the Wiki articles describing the new or updated features and how to use them. You can also subscribe to the Technical Journal that is sent out prior to each upgrade on the Newsletter Signup Page. (Unsubscribe here).

System Upgrade Process

The objective of the System Upgrade Process is to ensure that customers have a chance to review, without compromising the integrity of their production system, how their applications and information will work following the upgrade. In order to take advantage of this you will need to know how to access your backup instance of SmartSimple. If you need assistance with this either refer to the Backup Server and Testing Instances Wiki article, or contact the SmartSimple support desk.

For clients on a Dedicated Server, please review the SmartSimple Upgrade Process – Dedicated Server page.

Upgrade Schedule Details

The following tables outline the detailed upgrade release cycle.

If you are part of our Key Release your SmartSimple Cloud system will be automatically upgraded according to the following schedule. Generally North American Clients are on the Key release.

Hosting	Environment	Date	Maintenance Window	Typical Downtime
Key Release	Production	Second Thursday of an upgrade month	22:00 - 23:59 EST	5 minutes
Key Release	Backup	Two weeks prior to the production upgrade	22:00 - 23:59 EST	5 minutes

If you are part of our Global Release your SmartSimple Cloud system will be automatically upgraded according to the following schedule. Generally clients in Europe, Middle East and Asia as well as Managed Dedicated clients are on the Global release.

Hosting	Environment	Date	Maintenance Window	Typical Downtime
Global Release	Production	Fourth Thursday of an upgrade month	22:00 - 23:59 local time	5 minutes
Global Release	Development/Test	Fourth Thursday of an upgrade month	22:00 - 23:59 local time	5 minutes
Global Release	Backup	Second Thursday of an upgrade month	22:00 - 23:59 local time	5 minutes

If you are on dedicated environment that is client-managed your SmartSimple Cloud system is only upgraded manually by your system administrator or by submitting a request to SmartSimple. The upgrade package is made available for you according to the following schedule.

Hosting	Environment	Date	Maintenance Window	Typical Downtime
Global Release	All	Fourth Thursday of an upgrade month	client-managed	5 minutes

Backup Server Update

• Each backup server will be updated to the "release candidate" prior to the upgrade date.
• This update will provide for instance specific testing of release candidate, as you can log into your respective backup server and test the changes against your most current data and configuration.
• Internal staff will also be using these servers to perform instance specific testing.

Update Go/No-Go

• Subject to satisfactory testing on both the pre-production server and the production backup servers, the Go/No-Go decision will be made on Wednesday at 12:00pm.

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Current Upgrade Package: July 2016

The Production SAAS server was last upgraded on April 28th 2016, between 10pm - 10:15pm EST.

Important: The upgrade will be applied to your backup server one week prior to the scheduled upgrade date for your production server.
You are encouraged to log into your backup server during this period to test the changes against your most recent data and configuration. 

If your organization has a dedicated SmartSimple server or you host in-house, the upgrade will be made available on August 11th.

Global System Upgrades

The new features listed below are enhancements to the SmartSimple system and will be immediately available to SmartSimple users upon the application of the upgrade to their server:

Enhanced Group Email

Enhanced the group email feature with an improved interface, the ability to edit email contents on the fly, and a new default template that uses your branding. Also updated the behaviour within a UTA to save the emails as activities on the UTA object instead of the contact when there is an email activity type defined within the UTA.

Enhanced Annotations

Enhanced the Annotations feature with new option to control which user roles may see the Revision History, new option to open record directly in annotation mode. Also, updated the behaviour to only increment the revision number upon submit of the whole record as the previous behaviour would incorrectly increment the revision number upon each field update.

Enhanced Invitations

Enhanced the Invitation feature with new functionality. New import wizard allows you to bulk import contacts into the invitation screen. New ability to configure the maximum number of invites allowed and also instructions for the invitation screen. Updated the Variable Processor with the ability to retrieve invitation lists.

Updated Interface

Minor updates to various interface areas for improved look and feel. Some areas include the UTA status indicator standard field, modal windows, and some configuration pages as we continue to update older pages.

On-Demand System Upgrades

The following features are also available immediately with the application of the upgrade, but must first be enabled or configured by a System Administrator:

New Ability to Create Charts from List Views

New ability to build charts based upon List Views. Instead of having to build reports to generate charts, you can now easily generate a chart from a List View and quickly flip between views. These charts can be created as Arcadia X sections within the portal builder.

New BI Dashboards

New pre-defined dashboards for simple business intelligence. Easily create 6-chart dashboards to help you visualise and analyse your data.

Enhanced User Associations with Validity Date Ranges

Enhanced the contact association functionality with the ability to add start and end validity dates. Also added the ability to switch your current login session between the contexts of different organizations that you are associated to. This allows users to login as if they belonged to other organizations through their associations. The association validity dates will also carry through the various permissions and security throughout the platform such as the UTA security matrix that controls access to UTA records.

New E-mail Failure Notifications

New ability to designate email contacts to receive notifications for email send failures. This is useful in situations where you've configured SmartSimple to relay emails through your own SMTP server. In the event that email relays fail SmartSimple will use its own SMTP service to alert you about the failed emails so you may resend them.

Enhanced Arcadia X List View Section with Record Count

Minor enhancement to Arcadia X list view sections with the ability to display the current record count of items in the list.

New Integration with Adobe Sign

New ability to now use Adobe Sign (formerly EchoSign) to digitally sign documents in addition to our existing Signority service.

New Integration with Australian Business Register

New integration with the Australian Business Register now allows you to perform looks ups and validation on Australian registered businesses.

Updated List View Export with Disable Formatting Option

Minor enhancement to the List View export functionality with the ability to disable field formatting and only export raw field values.

Updated Report Charts with New Chart Types

Minor enhancement to report charts by adding several new chart types for you to use.

Notes for Administrators

The following features are more technical in nature and targeted towards an audience of System Administrators:

New Dynamic Field Visibility Controls

New Dynamic Field Visibility Controls is a simplified way to configure conditional custom field visibility. This new feature can be used instead of dynamic control custom fields or the showhideheader() function to control the visibility of custom fields that depend on the selected values of other custom fields.

Enhanced Allocations

Enhanced the Payment Allocation with the ability to define multiple types of allocations. This allows you to set up any number of allocation types to be used in the same system from earmarked fund allocation for future use to actual payment disbursements.

Enhanced PDF File Workflow Task with Ability to Store to Parent

Enhanced the workflow task for generating PDF files with the ability to store the files to a parent object. You can have a UTA Level 2 workflow that generates a PDF and stores it to its parent Level 1.

Enhanced Sign-Up Pages Now Allow Multiple Fields for Duplicate Match

Minor enhancement to organization and contact sign-up pages to allow for multiple fields to be used as the unique identifier when matching existing records.

Updated UTA Level 1 Standard Field Options

Minor enhancement to the UTA Level 1 standard fields to allow you the ability to disable the auto-populate behaviour of the owner and organization fields. Also enhanced the UTA Level 1 standard fields with the ability to restrict the owner and person standard fields to contacts within the current user's branch. Also enhanced the UTA object standard fields for multiple contacts and organizations associations with the ability to add instructional text within the tabs.

Updated Variable Processor with Signority History Variables

Minor enhancement to Signority integration for the ability to reference the document and signature histories via the variable processor.

Enhanced Login Page with Failed Login CAPTCHA

Enhanced the login page with the ability to add a CAPTCHA validation upon repeated failed logins for improved security.

Enhanced File Upload Custom Fields with Image Compression Option

New ability to create compressed copies of uploaded image files. File upload custom field types now have the ability to create a compressed copy of image files that are uploaded to the field. The image copies are compressed in file size and can also be restricted to a width of 1024 pixels. This functionality can be used for media heavy applications and displaying thumbnail images instead of full sized images for improved performance.

Enhanced Note Types to Allow Restriction of UTA Level 1 Types

Minor enhancement to Notes that allows you to restrict them to specific UTA Level 1 types.

Enhanced E-Mail with DKIM Signatures

New support for DKIM signatures for SmartSimple emails for further validation and security. This option is likely to be used within configurations that employ SMTP relay.

Updated Watch List Functionality with Ability to Bring Your Own CSIWeb Account

Enhanced the watch list functionality with the ability to bring your own CSIWeb account to SmartSimple. If you are currently already using this watch list service, it can be configured for use in SmartSimple.

Previous Upgrades

See the Previous Upgrades page for a list of previously-implemented upgrade features.

Future Upgrades

Click here for a listing of future upgrade dates.