Introduction
Three environments are available in addition to the live site. These serve to assist with checking the impact of code changes (We schedule product releases monthly.) and local development/testing. All customers are provided with a set of live environments (Service Designer, Customer Portal, Staff Portal, and Customer Service Hub as applicable). The other sites, which are optional, can be requested via your project manager or support team. Live, Pre-Live, and Test sites are included in your purchase of govService, but Dev sites incur an additional charge.
Available Environments
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Live (Standard)
The Live version of the Platform where citizens and Customer Service Agents access online services (Service Designer, Customer Portal, Staff Portal, Customer Service Hub, etc.)
Characteristics
Updates once every month (Normally released to Live on Wednesdays.)
When a form/process is published to live, this will be updated to the most recent code base
Firmstep recommend that processes/forms are built in Live and tested in Live - restrictions can be applied using permissions (and test URL), integrations can be tested with test back office systems using tokens. -
Pre-Live (UK/Ireland only, optional)
This provides an environment where the customer can test the impact of the upcoming releases before they are applied to the Live site (above)
Characteristics
Updates once every month in advance of the Live Environment (Fixes normally applied to Pre-Live on Fridays before they go live on Wednesday of same week, to give you the opportunity to review any possible impact locally, by carrying out tests as required on local processes/forms.)
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Please Note: Changes made in Pre-live do affect Live, and vice-versa. Since the upcoming release is applied to Pre-live on the Friday ahead of the Wednesday Live release, these environments will not always share the same codebase. However, they do share the same database. Therefore, although integrations and branding may not behave in the same way, changes made to integrations, branding, forms etc. in Pre-live will affect Live, and vice-versa.
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Granicus does not recommend using this environment to build and develop processes/solutions, especially as this environment will share the live database, so submissions made in pre-live will be shown in live, as will any configuration changes.
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Test (optional)
For making processes and testing them before going live, no direct relationship with live, but is on the current live release cycle so that it mirrors your live site. It is the customer's responsibility to import/export processes to this environment as required, and maintain any other local configuration. This includes amending any integrations to use any third-party test systems as necessary.
See further reading below for important set-up considerations
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Dev (optional, additional fee)
The dev environment is the same as the test environment, but some customers use the dev environment for making processes and then use the test environment for testing them. There is no direct relationship of the dev environment to the test or live environments. It is built using the live code but does not share the database.
It is the customer's responsibility to import/export processes to this environment as required, and to maintain any other local configuration. This includes amending any integrations to use any third-party test systems as necessary.
See further reading below for important setup considerations.
Note: When using test/Dev sites, care should be taken to ensure that test processes are not exposed to the public.
Further useful reading:
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