Upgrade Plan usage questions

[Doug Yorke]

I'm starting to explore Upgrade Plan for our organization.  I'm running into a technical issue and will submit a case.  However, I have a couple of general process questions: 

(a) I read you can only have one upgrade plan active at a time.  Our version release upgrade projects tend to be lengthy, so this is a concern.  If I build and publish an upgrade plan for Patch X, and then Patch Y is released and we change targets, is my original upgrade plan for Patch X no good?  It seems like I would I need to clone down to my Builder instance (which would put me back on something pre-patch X)  apply Patch Y, and then redo all the skipped changes using the task board. 

(b) I noticed that all customized records get moved into a Default update set within the Global Customizations application in a Builder instance. I assume that when I use the Upgrade Plan in a Consumer instance, the same thing will happen - all our customizations will appear to have an update in the Default Global Customizations application. Do I have that right?

[Mark Manders]

I would use upgrade plans just for the family upgrades, not for the patches. Next to that: on the patching rounds I do the checks for 10 instances at the same time and am done within a couple of hours max. I unserstand procedures and such, but patches often contain fixes for security issues. You may want to expedite the validation of those.