Upgrades

General Information

Next Upgrade Date

The next upgrade is scheduled for July 20 2023.

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 environments 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 Private Cloud enviornment, 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 Environment Update

• Each backup environment 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 environment and test the changes against your most current data and configuration.
• Internal staff will also be using these environments to perform instance specific testing.

Update Go/No-Go

• Subject to satisfactory testing on both the pre-production environments and the backup environments, the Go/No-Go decision will be made on the Wednesday prior to an upgrade release.

Upgrade Feedback

We'd love to hear your thoughts on our upgrade releases. Sign up to our feedback mailing list, and provide us your feedback after each upgrade. Your feedback will be shared directly with our development team and help shape our future development.

Give Feedback

Previous Upgrades

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

Current Upgrade Package: August 2018

The production environments for the Public Cloud were last upgraded on May 24th 2018.

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

If your organization is subscribed to Private Cloud hosting, the upgrade will be made available to you two weeks after the Public Cloud release.

General Details

Upgrade Dates

Public Cloud Production release date: August 16th 2018
Public Cloud Backup release date: August 2nd 2018

Private Cloud Production (Managed Upgrades) release date: August 30th 2018
Private Cloud Backup (Managed Upgrades) release date: August 16th 2018

Overview

Watch this video to get a general overview of the new features in this release.

To watch this video in full screen, please click on the full screen button on the bottom right.

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:

Major Updates

Updated List View Interface

Enhanced the user interface in several areas for greater ease of use and consistency in experience. The List View selector has been moved into the List View action bar. This was done to introduce more consistency into List Views across the system, and to make it easier to edit your List Views directly from this updated action button.

Like buttons are grouped together

We've also updated the look and feel of the Organization Hierachy and SmartFolders with new icons.

Updated icons

Enhanced Security Token Implementation for Standard Fields

Enhanced security for standard fields by introducing security tokens to be validated against upon save. This functionality has existed for custom fields and has now been extended to include standard fields as well. No change in behaviour is expected from this change.

New Visualization Chart for Record History

New chart feature to help you visualize all your activities. This chart plots the activities surrounding a record as well as its status history. Use this to easily review the timeline of a record and determine its relationship with each surrounding activity throughout its history.

Plot the status history of a Level 1 record along with when its Level 2 activities were created.

New Pending Workflow Indicator

New visual indicator to show whether a record has pending workflow tasks waiting to run. This icon will be displayed when viewing a record and can be clicked to display the list of workflow tasks still pending.

Easy access to view workflow tasks that are pending for a record.

New Configuration Folders

New Configuration Folders feature within SmartFolders. While the files within SmartFolders are stored as files within the SmartSimple application system, the new Configuration Folders will store files within the SmartSimple database. The advantage of this will be improved ability to transfer these across environments during your change management process via tools such as the Test2Production change promotion tool. Future enhancements can be built around these files to store more meta data related to the file, such as tracking changes and file versioning. Please note that there is a 16MB size limitation on files stored within Configuration Folders.

New Trimming of Trailing/Leading Spaces on Inputs

New functionality to trim leading and trailing empty spaces for single line inputs throughout the system. This is to prevent data entry and copy/paste errors that include extraneous spaces.

New Restriction Against Common Passwords

New password dictionary introduced for enhanced security. Enabled by default, this feature validates attempts to update your password, against a dictionary of commonly-used passwords. Attempts to set your password to an easy to guess and insecure password will fail. This will enforce the use of strong passwords throughout all users in your system. A setting to disable this feature can be found in the Global Settings.

Minor Updates

Updated and Reinstated Next/Back Navigation Buttons

Updated and brought back the Next and Back navigation buttons that progress through record tabs. These updated buttons will now also float above the save bar, so as to be visible without having to scroll to the bottom of the page as was previously necessary.

Navigate through multi-tabbed records using Back and Next buttons.

Enhanced User/Company List Views to Display Roles and Categories

Enhanced the user and company list views with the ability to list user roles and company categories as columns in the list. Note: this is just for display purposes, as the search filtering will not include this column.

New Copy Workflow Functionality

New ability to copy an entire workflow, on top of the current exporting/importing of tasks.

Updated SmartCheck Validation Display

Updated the Display of SmartCheck validation errors for improved look and feel. It will now be more obvious that you can click the error messages, and the fields with errors will be more prominently highlighted.

Updated File Versioning

Updated the file versioning feature on file uploads to use a 3-digit numbering syntax. For example, previous versioning named the files V1, V2,…etc. but will now name them V001, V002,…etc.

Updated Assignment List View Interface

Updated interface for the Assign List View feature, which has now been renamed to Quick Assign. The interface and certain text labels and buttons have been updated for improved usability.

New Import Wizard

New import wizard feature improves on the previous import wizard functionality. This new import wizard is meant for quick, on the fly data imports without having to configure an autoloader. You can find this in three locations: Global Settings -> Organizations tab, Global settings -> Users tab, or in UTA settings -> Level 1 tab.

The Import Wizard allows for quick one-time data uploads.

Expanded System Change Audit

Expanded the system change audit logs to now include changes to the organization/user security matrix.

New Data Exchange Failure Notification

Update to Data Exchange that will send an email notification to a user when sending a package has failed to be received by the receiving instance.

On-Demand System Upgrades

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

Major Updates

New Personal Dashboard

New personal dashboard allows anyone to create their own dashboard of list views, charts, or an aggregate value. You can create any number of dashboards as well as share them with others through SmartCards! You simply need to set the system feature permission for Personal Dashboard to enable this for users.

Users can build their own personalized dashboard.

New Cookie Policy and Template

New feature to alert users to the use of cookies on the SmartSimple application. This feature will need to be enabled within Global Settings -> Security -> toggle on Enable Cookie Usage Acceptance, which will then alert users landing on the login page and require them to accept the use of cookies. We have also introduced a policy template that you can use to create your own cookie usage policy within your Privacy and Security Policies.

Example cookie acceptance alert on the login page.

New Personal Data Erasure Feature

New Personal Data Erasure feature in order to comply with requests to delete user data. This new feature can be enabled on UTA Level 2 types as an individual's data erasure request. Within this Level 2, an administrator would then be able to review these Level 2 requests and have an option available that would delete the user profile of the Level 2 owner. A certificate of data erasure is then created in order to reference this activity.

New Advanced Data Table Show/Hide Columns Option

New option within the Advanced Data Table custom field to configure a condition to show/hide columns. You can now easily set conditions on when a column will display.

Extended Scheduled Report Exports to Custom Report Templates

Enhanced the scheduled report export option to be available for custom export templates. Previously, the scheduled report export was only available for file exports.

New Ability for Reports to Output Column Sum and Count Checksum Header/Footer

New ability to output the sum or count of a column in a report to the header or footer. In the report template setting of a report, you may include the below syntax in order to include a column sum or count. This can be used in the case where a report is being used for an integration and the export data needs to be formatted with a checksum in the header or footer.

@SUM(column name)@
@COUNT(column name)@

New Integration with Zoom Meetings

New ability to integrate with Zoom in order to schedule and manage meetings in Zoom. A new integration key of type Zoom has been introduced where you will configure the initial authentication settings for your Zoom account. This new feature can be enabled on UTA Level 2 or 3 types as a meeting. Within this Level 2 or 3 will be an option to create or update meetings in Zoom.

Minor Updates

New Option for Confirmation on Submit Buttons

New ability to configure a confirmation action on submit buttons. This will allow you to create an extra confirmation that a user really wishes to push that submit button.

Confirmation alert when submitting a record.

New Option for Confirmation Page After Submit

New ability to configure a landing page to display after submitting a record. You can now easily configure a screen to display to users after submitting, as opposed to the default behaviour of remaining on the record.

Configure a confirmation message to show after submitting.

Enhanced Invitation Feature with Additional Access Permissions

Enhanced the Invitation feature with more granular access permissions on the invitation templates. You can now configure permissions on individual invitation templates in order to restrict them to specific user roles or record types.

Expanded Language Translation for Template Pages

Expanded language translation functionality to template pages. You can now configure a template page for UTA Level 1, 2, and 3 with a language option.

New Graphical Display of Percentage Fields

New option to display percentage type custom fields as graphical bar, or pie charts.

Display percentages as a bar, or pie chart.

Enhanced Workflow Tasks to Send Adobe Sign Requests

Extended the ability for workflow tasks to be able to send PDF documents to Adobe Sign. The workflow task previously named Signority Submission has now been renamed to Online Signature Submission.

Updated Single Sign On to Allow Bypass of Two-Factor Authentication

New option for Single Sign On logins to bypass the need for two-factor authentication. Enable this when your organization already enforces two-factor authentication prior to SSO into SmartSimple.

Updated SmartCards Sharing Options

Updated SmartCards feature with the ability to limit the available settings for users. You can hide the role permission, or limit the roles that can be selected for users when they share their SmartCards.

Enhanced Autoloader with Ability to Map Object IDs

Enhanced the autoloader with the ability to map record relationships using SmartSimple unique identifiers. For example, the ability to update users and match them to organizations using an organization's SmartSimple companyID. Previously, this mapping was restricted to custom fields in order to compare matching values.

Added Autocomplete Column Option to Advanced Data Table Fields

New ability to configure Autocomplete input columns in the Advanced Data Table custom field type. These inputs behave similarly to the Lookup - Autocomplete Options custom field type.

Notes for Admins

New Ability to Log Off All Users

New ability to view the users logged into the system and to log them out. This can be used when you are performing maintenance or changes to the system.

New Autoloader Configuration Option to Receive Failure Notification Emails

New ability to configure an email notification when an autoloader fails.

New SmartField Option to Hide Instructions

New option within the Web Page View custom field to hide instructional text in field captions and the new instructions field type. This will not hide instructions in read-only fields.

New List View Icon to Indicate Addition to SmartCards

New option for list views to show a SmartCard indicator to indicate whether any of the records in the list view are associated to any of your SmartCards.

Updated Standard Fields to Allow for Caption Location

Updated standard fields with the ability to set the label location alignment.

Updated Portal List View Shortcut to Include Search Option

Updated portal shortcut links to show a text search option after opening a list view.

Updated Advanced Data Table Fields' Open and Save Functions to Resemble Others in SmartSimple

Updated user interface for Advanced Data Table type custom fields to open the window in a modal window as opposed to pop-up window. Also updated the save function to be more consistent as other save screens in the system.

Future Upgrades

Click here for a listing of future upgrade dates.