NSC Tenant Management View

 Tenant Management

Not every one will have the access to the Customer Central. Here is the view of how a NSC would create Tenant request and what options are available to request.

Any request related to refresh, exemption, renew, Implementer access etc. will be taken care here.

How many Exemptions are allowed on Sandbox?

Sandbox Refresh Exemptions

Workday allows up to two consecutive exemptions for refreshing Sandbox. 

What is Refresh Exemption ?

    Requesting a Sandbox Refresh Exemption simply means that the data and configurations aren't refreshed from Production that week.   

Where can we request the exemption ?

    Workday Customer Central. Navigation:

        Tenant Management > Create Tenant Request

Who can request for the exemption ?

    Exemptions can be requested by your organization's NSC (Named support contact) [usually the owners of the product in your organization] 

Points to Ponder:

• Every week Friday PST evening there will be a scheduled refresh activity in Sandbox. i.e. PROD data will be copied to SBX.
• You can't request a Sandbox refresh exemption prior to the Feature Release.
• Ad hoc Sandbox tenant refresh requests outside of our Weekly Service Update are not entertained.

2020 Release 2 In Preview Tenants

 2020 R2 - Available In Preview Tenants

With around 300 new or enhanced features Workday geared up for the new 2020 Release 2. As you all know we have two releases every year, its the version change (upgrade) of Workday in the second half of this year too. This is the second release in this year, the last one was in the month of March 2020 [2020 R1].

The preview tenants will get the version change one month prior to the release in Production. On the 8th of August 2020 we got the Preview tenants (Sandbox Preview and Implementation Preview) upgraded with the latest version i.e. 2020 R2. 

Here are some details regarding the Release. 

Aug  8,  2020 - Features available for Preview (Sandbox Preview, Implementation Preview)

Sep 12,  2020 - 2020 R2 available in all tenants (PROD, Sandbox, Implementation also)

Workday Data Centers - Workday Tenants

Here are the Sandbox Preview URLs that you can pick to login according to your organizations data centers.. Make sure you give your tenant name:

Atlanta:   impl.workday.com/<tenantname_preview>/login.htmld

Portland: wd5-impl.workday.com/<tenantname_preview>/login.htmld

WD3:       wd3-impl.workday.com/ <tenantname_preview> /login.htmld

WD10:     impl.wd10.myworkday.com/ <tenantname_preview> /login.htmld

WD12:     impl.wd12.myworkday.com/ <tenantname_preview> /login.htmld

WD102:   impl.wd102.myworkday.com/<tenantname_preview>/login.htmld

Access  the below Standard reports to see the new features and enhancements.

What's new in Workday

What's new in Last 7 days

What's new in Last 6 Months

What's new in Workday Data Sources

What's new in Workday Report Fields

What's new in Workday Reports

Workday Tenant Policies and Pricing

Tenant Policy and Pricing

Customers initially deploying the workday product for the first time will get below number of Initial tenants depending up on the size of the organization. Workers include both Employees and Contingent Workers (Contractors).

Core HR:

1. 3,501 - 20,000 Workers (4 Tenants)
2. 20,001 - 40,000 Workers  (5 Tenants)
3. Over 40,000 Workers  (5 Tenants)

Core Financials:

1. 3,501 - 20,000 Workers (5 Tenants)
2. 20,001 - 40,000 Workers  (5 Tenants)
3. Over 40,000 Workers  (6 Tenants)

Core HCM + Core Financials:

1. 3,501 - 20,000 Workers (7 Tenants)
2. 20,001 - 40,000 Workers  (7 Tenants)
3. Over 40,000 Workers  (8 Tenants)

Student Records or Admissions + Student Recruiting:

1. Less than 3000 Students (3 Tenants)
2. 3,501 - 9,999 Students (4 Tenants)
3. 10,000 - 19,999 Students (5 Tenants)
4. Over 20,000 Students (5 Tenants)

Adding other products like Payroll (1 Tenant) or Prism Analytics(2 Tenants) or Expense or Procurement (1 Tenant) will add the tenant count in addition to the above said.

Pricing:

It's not wise on my part to put the pricing, if you are interested please check the Community portal. 

All the pricing is dealt per month per tenant basis and categorized below number have different price attached to it.

# of Workers: <3,500

# of Workers: 3,501 - 10,000

# of Workers: 10,001 - 40,000

# of Workers: 40,001+

Points to Ponder:

• The additional tenants have a 3-month minimum duration.
• Customers can request to purchase a tenant by entering a purchase / renew tenant management request.
• Customers can purchase additional Implementation tenants at any time on a subscription basis, which can be used for training, implementing new functionality, testing changes to existing functionality, and more.
• The Initial HCM, Financials, and Student Implementation tenants expire 60 days after the customer’s Gold tenant is moved to Production. 
• The minimum duration for a purchased tenant is 3 consecutive months.
• The maximum duration for a purchased tenant is 1 year. A new order form will need to be processed after 1 year.
• At the end of the initial term, the tenant auto-renews on a 3 consecutive month bases for 1 year.
• Prism Analytics on additional tenant gives you 1 TB Storage with Published Rows up to 100,000,000

Additional Reads:

Workday Tenants

How to Know When the Tenant is Available after Schedule Updates

How to Know When the Tenant is Available after Schedule Updates

As we learnt, Workday Tenants are unavailable during .Weekly Service Updates and Workday Feature Releases

Your tenants some times may be available before the scheduled end time.  If you would like to be notified when any of your tenants become available after a Weekly Service Update or a Workday Feature Release,

Follow the below sequence of steps in which ever tenant the notification is required:

1. Create Custom Report - You can create your custom report with any report data source and fields. 
2. Create a new EIB Outbound Integration and use the newly created custom report as the data source. No Transformation required.
3. Use ‘Workday Attachment’ as the Delivery Method.
4. Set up the EIB Integration Notification (Trigger on Launch) to trigger when this EIB is launched. - Provide email IDs or Distribution list as who need to receive the notification also configure the Subject appropriately to indicate that your (PROD / Sandbox / Implementation etc.,) Workday tenant is available
5. Schedule the EIB to run after the maintenance window begins.( Weekly Recurrence 6:30pm PT on Friday for Sandbox and 12:30 am PT on Saturday for Production) 
6. When the service update is complete, the EIB will trigger automatically, and the notification email will be sent to indicate the tenant's availability.

Specially for Sandbox notifications, create the schedule in your Production tenant so that it copies over during the weekly Sandbox refresh.

Restricted to Environment - Sandbox  6:30pm PT on Friday
Restricted to Environment - Production 12:30 am PT on Saturday

Workday is planning for zero downtime as part of roadmap so, the above process would no longer be needed for the users to configure.

Workday Data Centers

Data Centers [Check Update Below]

There are 5 different data centers for Workday. Below is the list.

1. Ashburn
2. Dublin
3. Portland
4. AWS Columbus
5. AWS Montreal

Below shown are the sample URLs as how you login to the prod and non-prod Workday Tenants

Non-Production:          impl.workday.com

Production        :         www.myworkday.com

To check which data center you customer / organization is at, you can verify by logging into Workday Community or Workday Customer Center or Using Your Tenant URL Prefix.

Via Workday Community: 

1. Click your profile image and select View Profile.
2. Click your Organization (Company) name.
3. View the Production / Non- Production Data Center value.

Here is the 30 Days View for one of the Workday Data Center

24 hour View of one of the Workday Data Center

 

This shows 4 statuses:

• Available
• Maintenance
• Degraded
• Disruption

This provides details of upcoming scheduled maintenance, Historical view of the past 24 hours or past 30 days.

---

UPDATE:

WD1 - US Region

WD3 - EU Region

WD5 - US Region

WD10 - AWS ca-central-1

WD12 - AWS us-east-2

WD102 - AWS ap-southeast-1

WD103 - AWS eu-central-1

WD104 - AWS us-east-2

WD105 - AWS ap-southeast-2

Below are the URL prefixes you can make out based on the tenant you are logged in.

Workday Schedules ( Service Updates )

Feature Releases and Service Updates

There are two Types of Schedules that you can notice in Workday. One is Feature release which is like an upgrade and the other being Service updates which is like regular maintenance, or applying patches, fixes.

 Feature release:

Workday Feature releases occur 2 times per year. Version Change happens with every Feature release. (Not Future release)

Do remember every single customer will be on the same version and it is the latest version.

This includes New or Feature releases, Enhancements, Bug Fixes, additional Packaged Integrations etc.,
When Workday rollout the updates, the customer system automatically converts to the newest release.
Tenants are not available during the Feature release Weekend (which happens 2 times every year)

Dates: ( 2019 - 20 - 21 Schedule )

Previous Version - 32

February 4, 2019 - Features available for Preview

March     9,  2019 - Workday 32 available in all tenants

Previous Version - 33

August       3,  2019 - Features available for Preview

September 7,  2019 - Workday 33 available in all tenants

Here on the Versions are called with Year and Release, Example: 2020R1 , 2020R2 instead of WD34, WD35

Previous Version - Workday 2020 Release 1

February 1,  2020 - Features available for Preview

March      7,  2020 - 2020R1 available in all tenants

Previous Version - Workday 2020 Release 2

August        8,  2020 - Features available for Preview

September 12,  2020 - 2020R2 available in all tenants

Upcoming Version - Workday 2021 Release 1

February 6,  2021 - Features available for Preview

March    13,  2021 - 2021R1 available in all tenants

Service Updates:

Fixes are applied every Friday during Scheduled timings in the service updates.

During the scheduled updates you will notice the tenant will be down and a message saying "Workday is currently unavailable." with the duration of outage. Its generally a 12 hour window on a weekend for Non-Production environments.

Workday Tenants

Tenants

It is important to get familiar to the term ‘Tenant’. Here I will discuss about Tenant and its management in Workday. 

Tenant is a unique environment which holds different data set maintained by Workday. (logically separated in the database)

To my knowledge, the term Tenant was coined based on the Owner – Tenant, Example if you are renting a property from a land lord, then you are called as Tenant and the person who rent it out is the Owner. Here, Workday is allowing its customers to use the product in the cloud space, in-turn Workday charges its customer in the agreed frequency. (Annually / Quarterly).

In relation to other ERP's like PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle Apps etc. You can relate Tenant to Instance (or) Environment (or) Application (or) App. 

Each Tenant has a unique URL.

We can categorize Tenants broadly into two:

1. Production Tenant Types

• Production
• Sandbox
• Sandbox Preview

2. Customer Provisioned Implementation tenants:

• GMS / AMU / GOV
• Prototype
• Design
• Full Data Load
• Testing
• Gold

    Below I will describe each of these tenants

1. Production

         

         Production is your organization's system of record. This is the live tenant. All day-to-day transactions are captured here. Your business users will access it usually.

2. Sandbox

          

       Often called as copy of PROD. Sandboxes gets a refresh every week with the Production data as of Friday at 6:00 pm PT during Weekly Service Updates which is a scheduled one. You can log a Tenant management request to skip the refresh, you can skip refresh for a maximum of 2 consecutive weeks.

Ad-hoc basis refresh is not possible for Sandbox. If you plan to do so, consider Implementation Tenants.

Usage: Testing configuration changes, loads, replicate Production defects etc.,

3. Sandbox Preview 

           

         Sandbox Preview also holds the copy of the Production data, additionally it contains new functionality that may be available in a future Feature Release.

           Sandbox preview is refreshed every week during the Scheduled Friday Service update. One exception is - It is not refreshed 4 weeks prior to a Feature release.

Example: If you are currently on Version 33 in Production, then In Sandbox Preview you will get Version 34 (the next version #) prior to 45 days of Expected go-live. This duration allows you to test your objects, integrations and reports.

Workday doesn’t recommend you using the Sandbox Preview tenant for deployment work because –

• Sandbox Preview contains new features where other non-preview parallel tenants would not have. 
• Migration – Solutions doesn’t support object movement from Preview tenant to a Non-Preview tenant.
• We will not be sure when the new features in Sandbox preview will be available in PROD. 

Tip:

What's new in Workday – Use this report to compare and see the upcoming functionality with existing versions. 

4. Implementation 

           

      Implementation tenant gives more flexibility with respect to refreshes. Workday recommends using Implementation tenant if you are configuring new features which you think would take more than 3 weeks to complete the project.

The Implementation tenants are not refreshed with a copy of Production unlike your sandbox tenant. There are no mandatory refreshes but on ad-hoc basis.

Based on Subscription and Size of the company, your company will have additional implementation tenants. 

Empty Implementation tenant will be used for prototyping after initial discovery phase.

Used by: Developers, Implementation Consultants, Integration Consultants, Report Writing Specialists etc.,

5. Implementation Preview

            

              This is another preview tenant like Sandbox preview. Workday recommends Implementation Preview tenant if you are testing future features and you do not have a Sandbox Preview tenant. The Implementation Preview tenants are subject to weekly Service Updates, but the tenants are not refreshed unless you specifically request to do so.   

           The creation of your Implementation Preview tenant must be requested using the Workday Customer Center or the Workday Partner Center.   You must refresh the data in the Implementation tenant to transform it into an Implementation Preview tenant.

 Training Tenants:

    New customers are provided with either

• Global Modern Services (GMS) - Used by most of the customers 
• Green Oak Valley (GOV) or – Used by Universities and Colleges
• Alma Mater University (AMU) – Used by Education and Government Customers

The GMS, GOV or AMU tenant gives you an opportunity to see configured features and custom reports using fictitious organizations and workers. 

These Tenants are pre-configured with demonstration data.  

No customer or testing data should be loaded into the GMS, GOV and AMU tenants. 

Gold Tenant: 

        This Tenant is used to create the Production Tenant while you go-live initial deployment. A gold tenant is created empty and is used to load customer's data. It will eventually be used to create the Production tenant for a customer's initial deployment into production. You can request the Gold Tenant 6 Weeks prior to go-live.

         The term deployment tenant refers to the Implementation tenants used to implement the Workday solution, such as for loading employees, configuring features, testing, and building integration. The term deployment tenant does not refer to a customer's Production, Sandbox, or Sandbox Preview tenants.

 How is the initial Production Tenant Built when your Organization goes live?

• Build Gold Tenant from Scratch
• System testing and validation
• Move Gold Tenant to Production
• Production Tenant

Prototype Tenant: 

         These tenants are oftenly called with names P0 (called as P-Not), P1, P2 and P3. These are used during the implementation Phase where you Build, Test and Deploy you Organization data. These are Implementation tenants too.

Tenants are created, refreshed and deleted during the Tenant Maintenance Window.

How to request Workday Tenant Refreshes?

        Through Workday Customer Center (or) Workday Partner Center

All tenant requests like refresh, migration from one tenant to other are done though Tenant request and in-turn taken care by internal Workday JIRA tool.

How to identify the tenants?

Production --> www.myworkday.com 

Non-Production --> impl.workday.com ( Including Sandbox )