Gainsight's CS (SFDC) Release Process

Frequency

Gainsight releases new functionality approximately once per quarter. In addition, we also periodically release patches and emergency fixes. You can view the planned major release schedule on Gainsight’s Community, and any Maintenance & Incident updates on status.gainsight.com. We recommend following the Product News & Updates category in order to receive updates.

Note: Occasionally, we may need to delay a planned release by 1 to 2 weeks, in order to deliver the highest quality product. We will communicate the date change via the Community.

Release Timing & Queue Impact

Gainsight is moving from a 6-week release cadence to a quarterly release cadence. All Sandbox orgs will be updated at the same time as production orgs. The estimated time when these changes will go into effect is with the second 2022 customer release which is in the month of May, 2022. Please refer to the 2022 Calendar section.

Gainsight releases are pushed on the following schedule:

• NXT Major releases: Saturdays between 3 AM — 7 AM UTC

• SFDC Major releases: Tuesdays between 3 AM — 11AM UTC

• NXT Patch releases: Saturdays between 6 AM — 11 AM UTC

• SFDC Patch releases: Thursdays between 3 AM — 11AM UTC

• Hotfixes: due to the urgent nature of hotfixes, they may be released on any day of the week, but usually before 10:30am UTC. Hotfixes occur infrequently.

For information on whether the rules engine, data processing or data ingestion queues will be impacted by a given release, please subscribe to status.gainsight.com for updates regarding our US region, or eu-status.gainsight.com for our EU region.

2022-2023 Quarterly Release Calendar

2023 Quarterly Release Calendar

The following schedule may have slight changes to dates and release versions as the year progresses.

Automatic SFDC Upgrades and Opt-outs

Gainsight uses a “push approach” to upgrade customer instances - meaning Gainsight initiates the upgrade on specific scheduled release or patch dates. Most Gainsight customers receive automatic upgrades to their sandbox and/or production orgs on the scheduled release dates. However, if your organization needs to opt-out of the automatic upgrade process, please notify support@gainsight.com and provide your production Salesforce Org ID.

We strongly recommend staying current with Gainsight’s releases; and at a minimum, we suggest you avoid getting behind by more than one release.

If you opt-out of upgrades, we’ll notify you by email of a planned release one week prior to the production release. When you’re ready to upgrade, please contact support@gainsight.com and include your Salesforce Org ID. Our support team will work with you to perform the upgrade. (Note: please allow 2 business days lead time.)

Release patches and emergency fixes also respect your org’s opt-out settings.

Automatic NXT Upgrades

In addition to SFDC releases, Gainsight also releases upgrades to NXT. At this time, it’s not possible to opt-out of NXT upgrades.

Major upgrades on NXT require Gainsight to pause processing the scheduled backend requests (Ex: Rules execution, data load jobs, or CoPilot emails) for 2 - 4 hours typically. During this time, the Gainsight application is still accessible and can read and present the data in Reports, Scorecards, and Dashboards. We announce scheduled NXT releases in advance at http://status.gainsight.com. Occasionally, we apply hotfixes/emergency fixes on NXT. Often, a NXT patch is a prerequisite for an SFDC side upgrade.

Sandbox Upgrades

Some Gainsight customers maintain Sandbox orgs. Gainsight automatically upgrades Sandbox orgs with the nearly final release approximately two weeks before the production release. If your organization needs to opt-out of the Sandbox automatic upgrade process, please notify support@gainsight.com and provide your Sandbox Salesforce Org ID(s).

If you have recently performed a full refresh on a Sandbox org, please send support@gainsight.com the new Salesforce Org ID. We’ve found that when there is a full refresh of a Sandbox org, the org ID will change. The Salesforce Org ID is generally how we track opt-out requests.

Communications

• Two to three weeks prior to the production release, we email all Admins, Adoption Champions, Executive Sponsors, etc., with a detailed summary of the upcoming features via head’s up engagements and/or emails.
  Note: This will go into effect with the May customer release.

• On the day of the Sandbox/Production org upgrade, we post an in-app message on the Admin page and send an email to admins announcing the upgrade and sharing the links to new support articles and our finalized release notes.
  Note: Release Notes document covers all of the new features, enhancements introduced and escalations resolved in the release.

• Every patch release is accompanied by a Patch Release Notes document that contains the information about the product fixes.

• In-app engagements are launched when impactful changes are implemented in the application. This helps the user understand the new features and how to get the most value out of it.
  Note: Sometimes such engagements are launched before the actual implementation; this takes place to keep our users well informed about the upcoming changes; so that they get adequate time to prepare.

Product Roadmap & Feedback

At any time, you can submit product feedback through Gainsight’s Community. Our product team frequently reviews and comments on customer questions and suggestions. You can also vote for other member’s ideas, and our team will take this into consideration when prioritizing enhancements.

About once per quarter, our product leadership holds a roadmap webinar for customers where we share Gainsight’s CS product development plans. Webinar invitations are typically sent 2 to 3 weeks in advance.