Overview
Student Success & Engagement Test Instances (sometimes referred to as Sandboxes) are included for clients at the Enterprise level in order to aid implementation, ongoing testing, and adaptation of new features.
- This article is intended to help set expectations for institutions moving from Base or Advanced to Enterprise.
Q&A
Will customizations and configurations be shared between the production and test environments?
- No. When the test environment is created, it is an exact snapshot of the production environment, but after that point any customizations and configurations are separate.
- Customizations or configurations that are done in the test environment will not show up in Production or vice-versa; as they are not related.
- An institution can request that their test instance be copied from production up to four times per year. This request will utilize service credits. Doing this will overwrite everything in the test instance with an exact snapshot of the production environment.
Will SS&E releases update the test instance?
- Yes, all releases will push to production and test environments.
- Enhancements are not published in test environments before go-live.
Will all third party integrations be automatically included in environments?
- No, specific functionality currently set in production such as LMS, SMS, Messaging, Calendar, Surveys etc. will not automatically integrate with test environments and must be requested independently.
- Integration requests and configuration requests should be made at the time of test environment set up.
- Something to keep in mind are API limits on data retrieval. Some LMSs have daily API limit. Setting up the LMS integration in the test environment has the potential to interfere with the production integration if limits are exceeded.
How often will the SIS and/or LMS data update in the test environment?
- The SIS Data will update test environment once per day (overnight) by default.
- If the LMS integration is implemented, it will update daily or on the same schedule that production updates.
- A prerequisite is that the LMS integration and/or SIS Data Feeds are set up in test environment.
For more information about moving to the Enterprise level and adding a test environment, please reach out to your Client Success Manager.