We’re excited to continue bringing you more tools to effectively deploy, monitor, and manage your Zuora application. Check out a sneak peak into what’s coming next from our product team below:
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) refers to the way companies manage, track, and evolve their Zuora software application over time. Every company is constantly evolving as their business grows, and that means your Zuora use cases and configurations will change too. This may happen when you are:
As long as your business is not staying static, then your Zuora application won’t either. That’s where Application Lifecycle Management comes in.
Zuora is typically managed by a system admin or a business applications team within a company. As these teams take on new business requirements, they are translated to Zuora in the form of configuration, connector, or API changes:
As changes are made, there are 4 categories within Application Lifecycle Management that these teams rely on:
When it comes to testing strategy, companies need a series of defined tests to ensure that new releases do not negatively impact customers. Most companies have multiple stages of testing that require different sandboxes. Depending on the complexity of your business, you might have multiple environments to run different tests:
Activities:
Characteristics:
Activities:
Characteristics:
Activities:
Characteristics:
Activities:
With each release:
Characteristics:
Testing becomes more critical as the pace of your business changes increase. We’ve seen this happen at companies with a rapid pace of innovation such as Absorb, where a testing strategy was critical for business growth.
Zuora has a range of Sandboxes that maps to these testing best practices. The 3 different sandboxes are:
For companies with a rapid pace of new releases, some admins manage multiple changes to Zuora every single week. Deploying new configurations across environments takes time, and we recommend you take a more automated approach with the Deployment Manager and configuration templates.
Deployment Manager allows comparison and deployment of the configuration from one tenant to another. This includes setting such as:
For example, if you create an updated version of a workflow in an API Sandbox, you can now deploy it directly into your other environments (Central Sandbox, Developer Sandbox, or Production) with just a few clicks.
Configuration templates in the Deployment Manager helps you move event faster, enabling you to jumpstart tenants by importing a templated metadata configuration file. You can save multiple configuration templates, and easily apply them to different environments through simple UI interface or APIs. This lets your team to use rinse and repeat configurations during the development and testing process.
As you onboard new customers or run into situations where data migration is needed, your team may need tools to streamline mass updates. Developer Tools enable your admins and developers to:
As a final step, your admins and business applications teams should always be monitoring your use of Zuora to find improvement opportunities and detect system issues. We recommend checking the System Health Dashboard to get a full view into the following:
Did you miss our latest product update? Do you want to know the latest and greatest innovations from Zuora? Check out our quarterly update and learn about what was released recently.
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