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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:

Welcome to Workday Highlighting key enhancements and adoption tools
Feature release guidebook release planning resources
Solution catalog best practice tips submitted by community members
Product dashboards aggregate information for specific features, functions and products
Documentation the Workday Administrator Guide, Workday’s official documentation site
Uptaking features in weekly service update instructions for the review and uptake of new features
Service update notes new enhancements by product area
Features still in the works enhancements soon to be delivered
What’s New videos feature details by product management
Customer alerts official notifications about verified issues
Ideas delivered client-submitted ideas that have been incorporated into the release
Ideas available in preview client submitted ideas available in preview
Trending questions frequently asked questions about the current release

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