New Gainsight Release Cycle for Better Prep and Quality Experience

 Thank you!  Thank you!  Love, love, love, the advance copy of release notes and longer cadence between releases.  Will we also have the releases in our sandbox environments around when the notes are available prior to the production release?

Yes, we want to know this as well!

@neelam_mukherjee would you be able to shed more light here about the sandbox environment releases?

Adding @kendra_mcclanahan & @sidhu for more information on Sandbox Environment.

@neelam_mukherjee a few questions:

• when should we be expecting the “early head’s up about the upcoming changes” ahead of each quarterly release?  Since these releases will likely contain more changes, I would expect we’d have a longer lead time on notification. 
• on what cycle/cadence will Patch Releases occur?  Since we don’t receive a push notification on these, we need to know when to go and look for them.
• Any updates on the Sandbox Environment question? @kendra_mcclanahan @sidhu ?

+@jake_ellis, @dstokowski in the convo 

Hi Jeff @darkknight, 
Thanks for reaching out!
1. We’ll be sending the High-Level Product Release Summary list document by 6-7th April (through emails, engagements, and Community). Next release onwards we will share the info even earlier.  @courtney @chuck_girard @suresh_kumar

2. Patch Releases will occur as and when required. Docs team quickly captures the changes/fixes in the Patch Release Notes and make it available on the day of patch release (prod deployment).
(Total number of patch releases may vary - adding @madhu here for more details]
Note: If you are on NXT and admin, you can see the latest docs list in our Knowledge Center Bot in the application (only for admins areas). If not, you will find the info here and we’ll update soon after the patch release notes are published .

3. @kendra_mcclanahan for the Sandbox Environment question

Hi Neelam thanks for the update.  Additional question on 2:

Whenever patch release is required, is there a specific day/cadence for when those are released?  It’s not a great user experience to expect us to check the docs site every day, waiting to see if/when something has been released.  

We either need to know that they will be released on a regular cadence, so we know when to check, or we need to receive a push notification that it has been released.

Hi @neelam_mukherjee, Jeff @darkknight,
As you know, we do not have any planned patches and we are not planning to enable any major functionality during the patches, we do not have any planned dates for those.

On this request from Jeff - "we need to receive a push notification that it has been released."
One approach can be, we can publish the notes in a site and notifications will be received once subscribed to that site. @neelam_mukherjee will share more details on the approach.

FYI - @neelam_mukherjee  also confirmed that all patch release documentation (between 2 major releases) is referred as links and included in Next Major release.

@madhu  I know you’re not “planning to enable any major functionality during the patches” but as noted in the original post “The time between the two major releases will be pretty long, to fill the gap and continue pushing minor changes into the production orgs, we will be having more number of patch releases. These patch releases will typically contain escalations/known issues [with resolutions/with or without workarounds] and minor enhancements.”

Bottom line: Anytime a change is made to Gainsight, admins need to be aware of what those changes are. Even the smallest enhancement can catch us by surprise if we were not aware of it.

@neelam_mukherjee I look forward to learning what those communication channels will be.