Not Best Practices

 - and whomsoever wants to comment Slight smile

We have become aware of an issue with the upgrade to 12.3 reported by a customer. In this case not P1 but pretty close in terms of what was actually done.

The release notes state that in 12.3 the Opportunity fields "Best and Worst fields have been removed from the Opportunities' default layouts in Admin > Studio but can be added back to the layout, if desired.". Our experience is that the "Best" field (actually in use by the customer) has been removed but from a custom layout not just the core one. In this case, in addition, some other (custom) fields also reappeared in the opportunity layout as well, this is being looked at.

It is an exceptionally poor customer experience to be changing a custom layout without warning. This also seems to go completely against SugarCRM's published "upgrade-safe" guidelines. I agree that the field may not be used in core Sugar layouts in a new version but this was a custom layout which means it is there deliberately at the customer's request. Effectively SugarCRM have ignored their own rules and changed a file in the ./custom path when these are documented as being where customers (or partners) make upgrade-safe changes. The release notes do state that the "Best" field is removed from Opportunity layouts but it is perfectly reasonable for customers, partners, developers et al to assume this means from core files only, not from upgrade-safe custom files.

In this instance, the customer was using that field for data collection and display. What happened was that a field they use for key data disappeared and they had to wait until an admin-role person was able to rebuild the layout to restore the field. Until then they were not able to perform their normal duties.

Just to hammer home the point about how poor a customer experience this is: if you were having your car serviced, would you be OK with the mechanic removing the steering wheel as part of the service and then saying "We can put it back for you if you were actually using it - at a cost of course!"?

Whilst on the face of it this may seem a minor gripe, in this case (as with many others) we as partners manage the admin roles in the instance and so it is down to us to make these repair changes. What this means is that we have either a) to charge the customer for the work done to repair SugarCRM's mistake (not acceptable to the customer) or b) do that repair work for free (not acceptable to us).

I'd like to know what others think of this as I see it as a serious breach of the published "upgrade-safe" guidelines.

Rant over (for now!) Wink

JH.

Parents
  • Hi ,

    I agree with your general principle that the field should not have been removed from a custom-defined layout unless there was an explicit impact to functionality by leaving the field in place. I assume this isn't the case since Sugar allows the field to be placed back on the layout after the upgrade. It seems that there is either a documentation or product bug since the documentation clearly states 'default layout'. If you haven't already, I recommend filing a support case since they may be able to address this for the upcoming 13.0 release. 

    I disagree with your assertion that files in the ./custom directory should remain untouched. There are plenty of scenarios where the upgrade must make modifications to those files in order to ensure compatibility with new features coming in an upgrade. I would never expect files to remain 'as is' on an upgrade because they are located in the ./custom directory.

    I echo 's recommendation that you should be proactive in coordinating upgrades of non-production environments with Sugar Support. For all our SugarCloud customers with non-prod environments, we ensure we have at least 1 sandbox refreshed from production, upgraded, and signed off by the customer before coordinating their production upgrade. Two resources we review for each upgrade to identify emphasized areas to test are the release notes and 'what to expect when upgrading' KB article for that release. If you're unfamiliar with the 'what to expect' articles, they are very helpful in outlining expected changes in user experience. Here is the 12.3 article for reference:

    https://support.sugarcrm.com/Knowledge_Base/Installation_Upgrade/What_to_Expect_When_Upgrading_to_12.3/

    Chris

  • Chris,

    I agree with almost all of your points except to say that I didn't say that files in the ./custom directory should always be left as-is. I said that this is where you find files documented as being upgrade-safe. That means that, any specific documentation in the release notes notwithstanding, upgrades should not be removing fields from a custom layout as by definition that customer wants them there.

    I understand that there may be occasions when fields or functionality gets removed to make way for other stuff (and heaven knows, I have used Sugar long enough - since 2007 to be precise - to be aware of the complete mish-mush that is the ./custom directory) but such occasions should always be front and centre of any release announcement. This wasn't. And this does appear to be a bug.

    Thanks,

    JH.

Reply
  • Chris,

    I agree with almost all of your points except to say that I didn't say that files in the ./custom directory should always be left as-is. I said that this is where you find files documented as being upgrade-safe. That means that, any specific documentation in the release notes notwithstanding, upgrades should not be removing fields from a custom layout as by definition that customer wants them there.

    I understand that there may be occasions when fields or functionality gets removed to make way for other stuff (and heaven knows, I have used Sugar long enough - since 2007 to be precise - to be aware of the complete mish-mush that is the ./custom directory) but such occasions should always be front and centre of any release announcement. This wasn't. And this does appear to be a bug.

    Thanks,

    JH.

Children