Tenants Basics

Tenants Basics

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 )