Introduction

We usually release around three major versions of RIO Education each year. These releases contain new features, improvements to existing ones, bug fixes, and important security changes. Each release is free to install and incurs no further charges on top of your existing subscription.

We recommend you update your RIO Education installation at least every 12 - 18 months. At most you should not go more than two years without performing an upgrade.

Why is this? We typically only support RIO Education versions that have been released in the last two years. This means if you encounter a bug and you are on an old unsupported version, we may not be able to fix it or provide you with support. You also run the risk that a Salesforce platform upgrade can affect certain aspects of RIO.

It is much easier to upgrade a RIO Education installation that is only a few versions out of date, as opposed to one that is many years out of date. There are fewer release notes to review and fewer new or modified features to configure and test.

The following guide outlines our recommended way of managing RIO Education upgrades. This is only a guide, and if you are confident you can make changes to it as you see fit. If you encounter any issues throughout the process, please get in touch with our support team who will be able to help you.

If you are not feeling confident and would prefer more assistance, we offer a paid upgrade service with engagements between one to five days to help you through the process. One upgrade a year is also bundled with our premium support plans to help keep you up to date. Please get in touch with us for more information on this.

Prerequisites

You will need:

• A Developer or Developer Pro sandbox. This should be new, or refreshed, so it is up-to-date with production.
• A Partial or Full sandbox. This is for testing (UAT). Ideally this should be refreshed so it is as close to production as possible, but we understand this may not always be feasible.
• A dedicated RIO / Salesforce admin to oversee the upgrade and make the configuration changes.
• Representatives from different parts of your institute to help with testing - e.g. Admissions, Registrar, Finance, Assessments…

There is no need to rush this process. Please take your time in testing. It is much better to catch things early than it is for your users to spot something in production after you have deployed, which necessitates a quick and potentially rushed fix.

Remember that some installations are more complicated than others. For smaller, simpler orgs this may only take a week, but for larger institutions this may take a month or longer.

Step 1: Review the Release Notes

Before you start, you should identify the version of RIO Education you are already on. You can do this in Setup, by searching for “Installed Packages” in the Quick Find box, and finding the entry for RIO Education. The version number will begin with a 3 or a 4, i.e. “3.24.1” or “4.9.1”. The second number indicates the major/feature release number, and the third and final number is the “patch” version of that release. These patches are small bug fixes and do not contain new features.

Then, please review the specific release notes between the version after your current one up to and including the latest one. This will give you an understanding of what is new and what has changed. While you review the release notes, you should note down a couple of things:

1. The “Upgrade notes” section will include any manual post-installation configuration that you will have to perform yourself. The items in this section may relate to the current version or recent previous versions, so please double-check.
2. Under the “Upgrade” section, certain versions will include a “Metadata Updates” dropdown. You can use the installer to make these changes automatically (more on this later), but if you have customised these items, using the installer may overwrite your changes. If these have been customised and you need to preserve the changes, you can use this section as a guide to make the changes manually yourself.

Step 2: Familiarise Yourself With the Installer

Before you use the installer, you should first take some time to learn how to use it and familiarise yourself with some of its features. You can open the installer by opening the link in the release notes, or by accessing install.rioeducation.com directly.

When you first open the installer, you will be greeted with a screen that looks similar to the following. In this case, as you are upgrading RIO, you should click the “RIO Education - Upgrades” button and ignore the other options. Then, on the left, you can select the version you wish to upgrade to. Unless you have a reason not to, this should always be the latest version.

After opening the link to the version you want to upgrade to, you should see a screen similar to below. There will be a big button at the top of the screen where you can connect the sandbox or production org you want to install the upgrade into. After you log in, you will have to run some pre-install validations to make sure your org is compatible with the new RIO version. After this has completed, you will then have the option to begin the installation.

If you don't begin any installation within ten minutes, the validation will expire and you will have to re-run it.

Before you begin however, you should check each of the Steps included in the upgrade. For instance, the upgrade to 3.24 has two required steps and two optional ones. The “Check Transfer Credit Course ID” is a legacy step that makes sure old Transfer Credit records are populated correctly, and the “Install RIO Education” step is the main one that actually upgrades the managed package. The two optional steps are the associated metadata changes.

Metadata changes are things you are able to customise in your org related to the managed package, but not controlled by it. These are commonly Page Layouts, Picklist values, and Profile permissions. Depending on the particular changes in each RIO version, you may need to install these changes to unlock new functionality or prevent errors from happening. Each metadata change, if present, is documented on the Release Notes for that particular version. This way, you can review the precise changes to decide if you need to install them.

Step 3: Developer Sandbox Upgrade

As per the pre-requisites, you should start with a brand new or refreshed sandbox. It should resemble your production environment as closely as possible so there will be no unexpected surprises later on. After procuring the sandbox, you should complete any setup steps as normal, like loading your data in (especially important for Trigger Handler records) and setting up other packages.

You can then open the installer up and install the target version, logging into your developer sandbox when it prompts you and authorising the connection with the installer. If, after your review of the release notes you decide you want to automatically install the metadata, you can check the relevant boxes now, else you can keep reading this section and make the changes manually.

The installation process usually takes between ten minutes and half an hour, so you may wish to leave the installer open in the background while you do something else. But please don't close the tab!

If there are intermediate versions you need to install the metadata for, now is the time to do this. For instance, if you are upgrading from 3.20 to 3.24, you may wish to automatically install the metadata included in 3.21. You can simply go back to the installer, find the 3.21 upgrade plan, check the relevant metadata options you need, and start the install again. The installer will realise the target org is already on 3.24 and skip the upgrade to 3.21 itself, only running the metadata steps you selected.

Now that the new version of RIO is installed, we will make use of the DX Inspector to track any changes we make. This saves us from having to note down or remember every single change we made. The DX Inspector is a change management solution built into Salesforce sandboxes, and it allows you to track changes that have been made and deploy them to other environments. You'll need to turn it on first - you can do this in Setup by searching for “Sandbox Settings” and turning on the “Enable Source Tracking in this Sandbox” option.

It should look something like this. Note you won't be able to turn this on in Partial or Full sandboxes, which is why we are using a Developer sandbox to make the changes.

Then, refer to the notes you took while reviewing the release notes in Step 1. With the source tracking enabled, you can now proceed and make the changes you need to make. Note that the source tracking will only track changes made to metadata (page layouts, picklist, profiles, etc.). Any data you change - i.e. Trigger Handler records - will not be tracked, and you will have to repeat these steps when you promote the upgrade.

You can then complete some quick testing yourself to ensure the system is generally working at a high-level. You don't have to be thorough here, that will happen later. When you are confident the new version of RIO is ready, you can promote the upgrade to your UAT environment and start testing with the power users.

Step 4: Deploy to UAT

When you are ready to deploy to UAT, you can repeat the steps above to install the new version of RIO Education using the installer. Remember to install the automated metadata steps if you selected any earlier.

After the installation has completed, return to the Dev sandbox and open up the DX Inspector in the top left of your screen. It's the three horizontal lines next to the sandbox indicator (highlighted below). Accept any terms and conditions it may present you with.

You will then see a screen showing all of the metadata items that have been changed since you enabled source tracking earlier, with options to select them. In the example below, we have already selected the relevant changes we want to deploy.

Note we have excluded (left unchecked) the changes related to the Named Credentials and the “AccessDevOpsCenterNamedCredentials” Permission Set. These are not related to the RIO upgrade and are unneeded for this.

When you have selected what you wish to deploy, click the “Deploy Options” button at the top right. You will then have to select an org you wish to deploy to. As you are opening DX Inspector for the first time, this list will be empty. Switch to the “New Environment” tab to connect your org, where you can name it, choose between Sandbox/Production, and then log in and accept the connections.

Switch back to the Existing Environment screen to proceed, and select the org. Then click Next.

You will then see a final confirmation screen. Double check you have selected the correct metadata and then click on Deploy.

You won't be presented with a monitoring screen afterwards, but you can keep track of the deployment by either switching to the History tab in the DX Inspector (the one with the calendar icon, on the left), or by returning to the UAT environment, and opening up the “Deployment Status” page in Setup.

If the deployment fails, you can check the details by opening the entry under the “Failed” header in the UAT monitoring status. Common sources of error are usually because the sandboxes are running different versions of RIO or are on different Salesforce versions (i.e. dev is a preview running a newer version than UAT).

When the deployment succeeds, you are ready to begin testing. The exact testing steps will look different for everyone, but here are some general ideas you can use to guide you. Long term, you or your organisation should develop high-quality, well-defined and repeatable testing steps you can use. This will help not just with RIO upgrades, but whenever other changes are made to your system too - be it platform updates from Salesforce, new version of other packages you have installed, or if you develop new custom processes.

• Can I submit an application? Can I approve it? Does approving the application generate the enrollment data I expect? Does it work for both new and returning users? What about students who may have credit transfers to process?
• Can I enrol students into courses and sessions using the enrollment wizard? If the offerings are full, can they join the waitlist?
• Upon enrollment, are the students billed the correct fees? If I withdraw on or before the census day, are their fees still cancelled?
• Can I release the grades for a term? Do I observe any errors to do with batch sizes that I need to adjust? Am I able to retry the job?
• For existing students, is their completion calculated correctly following a grade release? What about their GPA? If there are problems, am I able to recalculate their progress and does this fix their completion?
• As a faculty member, can I log into the faculty portal? Am I able to see the sessions I'm assigned to? Am I able to accept new sessions? Can I take attendance and grade my students? Are any permissions errors thrown?
• As a student, can I create a portal account? Can I then log in and do everything I need to do? Do I have access to all the data I need? Can I request or generate a transcript? Are any permissions errors thrown?

If your team reports any errors while testing, return to the Dev sandbox to make the changes before deploying them over to UAT using the DX Inspector.

If you encounter any errors which you are not able to diagnose or fix, please get in touch with our support team and explain that you have noticed issues while testing, and provide both your original and new version numbers. We will be able to help you resolve these.

Step 5: Deploy to Production

When testing has finished and everyone is happy with the new version, it is time to start thinking about the deployment to production. We recommend installing the upgrade after business hours to minimise any disruption, especially between that point in time when the base package has been upgraded but the metadata has not yet been deployed. You may also wish to consider any integrations that are running, and whether you should temporarily pause these during the upgrade.

We usually recommend allocating one hour for the upgrade, but depending on the complexity of your org you may wish to take longer and run some quick tests to validate everything has gone smoothly and your daily operations will not be affected.

It is important to be mindful of the fact that you are unable to roll-back or downgrade your version of RIO Education after it has been installed, so please be sure you are comfortable with the level of testing that has happened and are confident that no major issues will arise.

For the production deployment, you can repeat the steps you used for UAT. First install the right version of RIO Education (this time selecting the Production option when connecting your org to the installer), then when that has finished deploy any of the metadata packages you need. Afterwards, return to your Dev sandbox and use DX Inspector to connect to prod and deploy the metadata changes, along with anything else that was changed as a result of testing.

If all has gone well, congratulations, and welcome to the new and updated version of RIO Education.

Conclusion

Updating such a large package as RIO Education may feel like a daunting task, but by breaking it down into smaller steps and conducting thorough testing, you can be confident of catching any issues before they enter production. And by keeping up to date, you can always take advantage of the new features we provide, alongside improvements to existing ones, and peace of mind that you will have the latest security improvements and access to timely support.

Remember, if at any time you run into issues during this process, you can contact our support team for advice, or consider taking out one of our premium services to get hands-on assistance.