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Quick Links
Next Experience Readiness Checker
Next Experience Quick Start Guide
Next Experience Product Documentation
How to Roll Out Next Experience
Overview
We just released our new Next Experience Readiness Tool as a Store download. After receiving feedback from customers that walking through some of the consideration steps in the product documentation was a very manual process, we created this tool to automate some of that and assist your team with decision making. Our team will provide an over and demo of this functionality in our Next Experience Academy, but this article will provide a quick runthrough as well.
Here's an overview of what the scan looks for:
- Connect Chat: Messages and/or Conversations in past 30 days. Connect chat is currently in maintenance mode and some features have been replaced by Sidebar in Tokyo.
- Connect Support: Messages and/or Conversations in past 30 days. Connect Support is a product that is deprecated as of the Utah release.
- Live Feed: Messages and Feeds in the past 30 days.
- Follow: Messages and Follows in the past 30 days.
The cards will give you a single score of the results with the option to drill down into the tables with links. If a replacement feature is available per the version your instance is on, it will also include information, such as Sidebar for Connect Chat. This tool is really helpful to pinpoint if your instance is using unsupported features in Next Experience, and how often. You can drill down into the tables to see who is using these features, which helps you make decisions on if you should roll out Next Experience to particular users via group, and takes the guesswork out of the magnitude to which these features are being used.
Our team has released guidance on rolling out Next Experience, so if you have users that need to need to remain on Core UI to use features such as Connect Support until your organization migrates to Agent Chat, then you can allow these groups/users to do so while the rest of your organization cuts over.
Note: The readiness checker does not check for customizations that are mentioned in our product documentation, as we could not account for the variety of customizations performed by customers. We advise customers to run normal upgrade and/or regression testing after enabling Next Experience in a sub-production instance and remediate any customizations as necessary, some examples include: Modifications made to the UI16 Banner Frame, DOM Manipulation found in UI Scripts, UI Macros, Client scripts, etc.
Steps
The Next Experience Readiness Checker is a Store download and is supported on San Diego and Tokyo instances with Next Experience deactivated. If you want to test this in a Sandbox instance that already has Next Experience you can set the glide.ui.polaris.experience system property to false for testing, but be advised you more than likely need a recent clone of Production so you have up to date Connect and Guided Tours data to test against.
1. Have a recent clone of production in your Sandbox to test against most up to date data or you can run this on Production. The tool does not generate demo or testing data so your normal Production processes will not be impacted by this tool. It simply gets counts of records in tables, if you have any hesitation about large tables and performance, make sure you run the tool outside of business hours.
2. Download the Next Experience Readiness Checker from the Store and install it on the instance you want to run it on.
3. Once installed, a module named Next Experience Readiness Checker will be visible to users with the admin role. The checker will show you what current release version your instance is on, and have a button to run the scan. The scan does not run automatically when opening the checker, so you will see empty states in the tiles until the scan has been run.
4. Once you've read over what the features are (if not already familiar) then click the Run compatibility scan button and wait a few moments for the results to be processed. Since we're checking for a 30 day aggregation, the results shouldn't take too long, even on tables with large amounts of records.
You can then drill down into the records to see information such as who is taking a Guided Tour and which one it is, or which users are utilizing Connect Chat/Support and make decisions on how to roll out Next Experience from here based upon the usage of these features in the past 30 days. If a unsupported feature has a replacement for the current release you're on, you'll see a recommendation for the replacement feature. There is also a summary at the bottom for recommendations based upon the findings.
5. Once your organization has made a decision on enabling Next Experience, you can do it with one click from the checker itself via the Turn on Next Experience button. As mentioned, you should perform testing and plan for communications prior to enabling Next Experience. In your running the checker in a Production instance, this data would be used for decision making prior to testing and remediation, and then can be returned to once your organization is ready to activate in Production to turn on Next Experience. If you're using this in a sub-production environment, you can use this button right after the scan to enable Next Experience if you wish.
As mentioned, the Next Experience Readiness Checker is a great tool to take some of the guesswork out of unsupported and soon to be deprecated features and to assist with the first step in the decision making process of whether to enable Next Experience for the current release, and to decide your rollout strategy. Further testing, potential user interface customization remediation, and communications/training plans will need to be done prior to activating Next Experience in Production.
Further Reading
