Platform Upgrade

RIO Education is built on top of the Salesforce platform. When Salesforce releases changes to its platform, it is important to ensure your business continuity. This article will provide the best practice to manage these changes.

Salesforce has 3 major releases per calendar year (Spring, Summer and Winter). Salesforce will push these releases to your instance automatically based on the agreed date. Salesforce will communicate all the release information and schedule to your Salesforce Administrator account. They will also release some documentations to share their plan with you. For example, the Admin Guide for Winter 25.

To check the exact release date from your instance,

Step 1: Go to Company Information page to get name of your instance. Production and Sandbox will have difference instance. 

Step 2: Look for your maintenance schedule using this link: https://status.salesforce.com/instances/AP44/maintenances/ (please swap AP44 to your instance name)

Step 3: Under the MAINTENANCE tab, you should see the exact date of the release. For example, for AP44, the Winter 25 release date is 12th Oct 2025.

For all RIO Education customers, we recommend you to plan your testing according to the Salesforce release cycle. This is to ensure that the customisations are working as expected. If your team has sufficient resources, it would be great to have an end-to-end regression test of all your use cases. If not, we would suggest to have test plan, either manual or auto, for major/critical operations such as:

1. New applicant sign up process - Critical because of the potential loss of new application.
2. Student enrollment process - Critical if students cannot enroll to their courses when the enrollment period starts.

Any real-time impact that may cause your users unable to perform critical tasks should be categorised as such. 

RIO Education Product Upgrade

As part of our QA practice, our product team will also test our product core features against the new release. Usually, Salesforce will release the preview org 1 month before the release date. Our team will step through the following process:

Week 1: Regression testing for core major features. At this stage, we will identify if a patch is required.
Week 2: (If patch required) Communicate with the customer about our patch release timeline. 
Week 3: (If patch required) Work with the customer to nominate a sandbox for the patch to be released.
Week 4: (If patch required) The patch can be tested together with other test plans as per discussed above. The final patch will be pushed to the customer production instance as per the patch release timeline.