Upgrade process overview

Upgrading UAT process outlined 

• Whitespace will offer you an uat upgrade date with approx. 3 weeks notice 

• The week before the agreed date 

  • a uat site will be created (if it doesn’t already exist) 

  • the uat site will be updated with a copy of your live site (note that any data or config in the uat site will be over ridden) 

• Whitespace will confirm to you the url for the ‘uat’ site once it is available 

• Whitespace will give you access to our Training Portal where you will find several familiarisation videos and the release notes 

• Please thoroughly test the ‘uat’ site, including integration with your CRM system (if applicable). Please encourage as many staff as possible to have a look at the familiarisation videos and the ‘uat’ site 

• Whitespace will check in with you each week to see how the testing is going 

• If you find any issues please raise them on the support portal using the ticket type of ‘Whitespace Upgrade Issue’ 

• The UAT site will be slower than the Live site will be after upgrade 

Upgrading Live process outlined 

• Once you have confirmed that you are happy to take the upgrade to ‘live’ we will agree a mutually convenient date 

• Typically the upgrade will take place at 4pm and is likely to last approx. 3 hours 

• During the upgrade the ‘live’ site will be offline 

• Whitespace will confirm once the ‘live’ site is back up 

• All queries arising from the upgrade should be raised on the Support desk using the ticket type “Whitespace Upgrade Issue” 

• During the ‘live’ upgrade please ensure that integrations to it are paused (eg CRM integration) 

• Note that your Analytics Dashboard will not update for 2/3 days after the upgrade. Whitespace will confirm once your analytics has been refreshed and is back updating daily 

• If you had access to a ‘test’ site then please note that this will not be upgraded immediately and is likely to be taken offline once the ‘live’ upgrade has been done. The ‘uat’ site should become your playground/test environment going forward. 

Technical Note 

When Whitespace build your new v11 site from your ‘uat’ site we will in fact create a new server and when configuration and testing is complete we will point your URL at this new server and let you know when this is complete.

Your old server will then then be deleted securely. This process is well established and robust, but can suffer from DNS Propagation delays. These happen because of the way the web is built, with servers around the country and around world caching server information to make access faster. However, when we change the server, it sometimes takes time for the caching to be flushed through on internet servers that are outside our control.

This can result in delayed availability and Gateway 500 errors when you access your Whitespace or API system. The delay is normally less than an hour, so when you are first notified that your new system is Live, don’t raise tickets if at first you have Gateway errors, these are very likely to be DNS Propagation delays that will sort themselves out when the internet catches up.