White paper: Workday release updates planning and considerations

Twice a year Workday releases new features to their platform. The Workday ecosystem has proved revolutionary in many ways, replacing numerous legacy systems with a single unified cloud-based application.

Preview and download Alight's white paper on how to best leverage Workday Community for planning and considerations around Workday updates, including the What's New in Workday report.

Workday Community provides documentation for each release, plus tools and resources to help successfully navigate each release cycle. Those organizations that plan in advance, have the right resources involved and thoroughly regression test business processes to capture any impacts new features may have on their system, reports and integrations, are more likely to have a successful roll out of the new functionality.

General new Workday release resources

How Workday Delivers Features and Workday’s Feature Release Process FAQ provide important information on how Workday provides new functionality through:

• Weekly service updates which occur within the weekend maintenance window and deliver timely fixes and improvements that won’t impact end-users.
• Feature releases which are delivered on a six-month schedule contain many new features and functionality that may require uptake. Beginning after the Workday 33 release, these feature updates have been renamed using a naming convention to a calendar year and bi-annual release number (1 and 2). For example, Workday 2020 Release 1 and Workday 2020 Release 2. 

The Workday Release Center is a one-stop shop for all release-related communications, documentation and notices. Located in the Release Information drop-down menu on the Workday Community home page, the center is updated for each release.

Resources include: