Apply critical updates

This is for:

System Administrator

A critical update is an important change in the features of the Coveo Platform that may require extra validation steps or manual configuration in your organization. Most importantly, a critical update gives you the ability to decide, for a given time frame, the most favorable time to apply the update to your organization.

Conversely, non-critical updates are automatically applied to Coveo since they don’t require any action on your part.

With the Critical Updates (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, you have the opportunity to proactively apply a critical update in order to test it and take the required actions to adapt your organization before this update officially becomes part of Coveo.

Tip
Leading practice

Testing updates in a sandbox organization or during off-peak hours is recommended.

When a new update is available on the Critical Updates page, Coveo informs organization administrators by email. It’s then the administrators' responsibility to activate the update in a sandbox organization to test it. Once they have checked that the update doesn’t affect their organization customization, they can activate it in their production organization.

Regardless of whether administrators test it, a critical update will eventually become an official feature of Coveo and be automatically activated for all organizations. At this point, it will then no longer be possible to deactivate it manually from the Critical Updates page. For more information on this process, see Critical update test process.

Activate or deactivate a critical update

Updates apply to your Coveo organization shortly after their manual activation. You can activate an update temporarily for testing purposes or, when you find the update satisfactory, you can activate it to start benefiting from it without waiting for its official release.

Deactivated updates don’t apply until Coveo officially releases them. Once it does, they can no longer be deactivated, and their status becomes Permanently activated.

  1. Access the Critical Updates (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page from the notification center (bell-24px) in the Administration Console header.

  2. On the Critical Updates (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click the desired update, and then click Activate or Deactivate in the Action bar.

  3. Click Activate or Deactivate to confirm.

Critical update test process

The following is an example of a workflow taking place at your company when a new critical update is available.

  1. As a Coveo organization administrator, you receive an email informing you of the availability of a new critical update.

  2. You read the message and the documentation relative to the critical update.

  3. You define a testing plan for the update and inform your coworkers of the upcoming changes.

  4. You activate the critical update in your sandbox organization, which is your test environment.

  5. You monitor how the organization behaves with the update, looking for errors and/or incoherent behaviors in the Activity Browser and Log Browser. You can also conduct manual tests if needed.

  6. Should an issue be identified, you take steps to fix it. You can seek help from the Coveo Support team. While working on a solution, you can deactivate the update in your sandbox organization.

  7. Once you fixed your sandbox organization, you can test it with the critical update activated again.

  8. When satisfied with the test results, you apply your fix to your production organization. You can then activate the update in this organization as well.

  9. Coveo officially releases the update. If the critical update isn’t already activated in your production organization, it’s automatically activated, and you can no longer deactivate it. If you manually activated the update, the permanent activation has no effect on your organization other than preventing you to deactivate this update.

Required privileges

The following table indicates the privileges required to view or edit elements of the Critical Updates (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page (see Manage privileges and Privilege reference).

Action Service - Domain Required access level

View the list of updates

Organization - Critical updates
Organization - Organization

View

Activate/deactivate updates

Organization - Organization

View

Organization - Critical updates

Edit