2116689 - SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite Upgrade Center

Symptom

What is the Upgrade Center?
What are the key benefits of using the SuccessFactors Upgrade Center?
How do I access the Upgrade Center?
How to do a SuccessFactors product upgrade

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.

Environment

SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite

Resolution

What is the SuccessFactors Upgrade Center?

The Upgrade Center allows customers to easily upgrade their SuccessFactors HXM systems
With built in documentation and self-service activation of new features, the Upgrade Center is designed around communicating and activating key enhancements as easy as possible

Note: The Upgrade Center does not initially replace the regular process of activating the entire breadth of product updates that come with the quarterly release process. Rather, it supplements them with the ability to activate major opt-in enhancements that would normally require a support case

Key Benefits

Increased Innovation: Over the years we've made considerable improvements to the look, feel, and performance of your SuccessFactors application. Make sure you are taking advantage of some of the more important, easy to administer upgrades!
Ease of Use: Available upgrades are intuitively displayed and after reading support information, you can upgrade your system in a single click! Because of this, within the upgrades available in the Upgrade Center, you won't have to submit a support case!
Summary of Upgrades activated within Upgrade Center: You can also get a snapshot of past upgrades performed via the Upgrade Center, get additional information about the feature, and even undo the change!
Ability to undo upgrades: Upgrades that have been performed in the Upgrade Center can be undone within 10 days of that enhancement being activated! Please note that if you choose to submit a case to have Support activate a feature listed in the Upgrade Center, you will have to submit a case to undo that action as well.

Accessing the Upgrade Center

The Upgrade Center can be accessed by anyone with access to Admin Center
It is possible to control the access specifically to Upgrade Center through Role-Based Permissions
If you want to enable this, grant permissions to your users to access Upgrade Center in RBP
See KB article 2196363 - Upgrade Center access permission
Once the access is granted, you will have access to the tool:

Upgrading a feature

To upgrade a feature, click the button "Learn More & Upgrade Now" in the bottom of the description of the upgrade you want to do
After, a pop-up window will open and two options will be available:

Upgrade Now: to upgrade the feature in that exact moment
Save for Later: to save the upgrade and review, upgrading only in the future when you approve

FAQ

Which upgrades show up in the Upgrade Center?

Features will only be shown if you do not have them activated. For example, if you've taken advantage of Home Page tiles, the feature will not be listed within your Upgrade Center because you've already activated it!
Secondarily, not all new features will be included in the Upgrade Center. It is up to the discretion of our Product Management team to choose what should be listed here but typically they are high impact items that are very popular among customers that have activated them.

What happens with dependent upgrades?

Some features require the customer to have another feature enabled before they can perform the upgrade. For example, v12 Profile and v12 Home Page require v12 Revolution UI. You need to enable both individually, one before the other.
Using the v12 Profile example. If a customer does not have v12 profile or v12 UI enabled, they will see both features listed in the Upgrade Center. But if they click on the v12 Profile option first, they will be notified that the upgrade cannot be performed until the dependent upgrade(s) are completed.

How does the Undo feature work?

Not all upgrade items support 'undo', it depends on the features - for example, currently DRTM upgrades cannot be undone.
The 'undo' feature only works for 30 days after the activation occurs. After this period, please contact Support to have an enhancement reverted.
Only features that have been activated within Upgrade Center can be undone within the Upgrade Center. If you have submitted a support case to have the V12 Revolution UI activated, for example, you should submit a case requesting our Support team to undo it as well.
Features that are dependencies of others need to be undone with the feature that depends on it.

Who can perform the upgrades in customer instance?

All admins can see and be educated about all upgrades, but not all admins can actually perform the upgrade themselves. For each feature the necessary admin privileges required to do the upgrade are built into the validation of the feature in the Upgrade Center.

How can I know when some feature described in the Announcements will be released and available for upgrade?

You can check information regarding the plan of release of the announcements through the Community portal. There you can contact directly our Product Managers and verify when is the plan to make that feature available.

Note: See additional information about using the functionalities of Upgrade Center in the Help Portal page

FAQ - Additional Information

Q) Where can I get information on this from the Guide?

A) Guide:Enabling Intelligent Services and Retrieving SuccessStore Rules with Upgrade Center

Keywords

sf, success factors, feature, FAQ, Upgrade Center , KBA , LOD-SF-PLT-UPG , Upgrade, Patches, Lifecycle Management , LOD-SF-EC-ADM , Admin Tools (EC Core only) , How To

Product

SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite all versions