Our Successful Upgrade to Relativity Server 2022
Upgrading major software can be a daunting task, with many moving parts to consider: functionality and architectural changes, third-party software dependencies, customizations, workflows, communication needs, staff availability, user training, and more. It’s no surprise that many companies wait for others to upgrade first or avoid it altogether, leaving their systems out-of-date for longer than ideal. In a recent survey of the eDiscovery community, 34% stated their average upgrade time is between one and three months.
At Oasis, we saw the upgrade to Relativity Server 2022 as a necessity and took on the challenge to give our partners a competitive edge by being on the latest and greatest version. We are proud to announce that we have completed an upgrade of all our Relativity instances from Relativity Server 2021 to Relativity Server 2022, making it the largest software upgrade we’ve ever completed. Hundreds of our servers in the US and UK environments were upgraded seamlessly, and below are the key factors that contributed to our success.
A Dedicated Team of Experts
Upgrades of this scale require a strong team with a range of expertise, including technical experts, functional experts, partner advocates, and a project manager. Our core project team consisted of five people with extensive Relativity upgrade experience, and we had up to 22 Oasis personnel involved at different stages of the process. We also communicated weekly with senior Relativity team members to quickly escalate any issues that arose during testing.
Focus on Two Major Changes
In addition to our standard objectives of testing third-party applications, custom scripts and applications, and back-end customizations, we identified two major changes that needed to be addressed during the upgrade: the introduction of the Aero UI and the fact that we had more than doubled the number of servers in our environment since the last major upgrade. We made sure to clearly communicate the Aero UI changes and made it accessible in a sandbox environment for training and testing. We also made sure to plan and test for the upgrade at scale to ensure we could meet our timeline.
Hundreds of Hours of Research and Testing
Our team did extensive research and testing to ensure a smooth upgrade process. We investigated release notes, known issue lists, and community postings, and conducted smoke testing, end-to-end functional testing, load testing, and security testing. We also tested all of our custom solutions, including over 200 front-end scripts and applications. We set up a sandbox environment for our team and partners to test and provided training on the new Aero UI. An amazing 40% of our partners participated in the early access/testing process.
A Thorough Upgrade Plan
We created a detailed upgrade plan that included all necessary tasks, dependencies, and timelines. We also made sure to have contingency plans in place in case any issues arose.
Overall, upgrading to Relativity Server 2022 was a significant undertaking that required collaboration and communication between our team members and partners. Despite the challenges, the hard work of our dedicated team and thorough upgrade plan paid off, and we were able to successfully upgrade all of our Relativity instances to the latest version. Since the upgrade, many of our partners have reported that the environment feels faster and more efficient. We believe that this upgrade will bring valuable benefits to our partners and help them stay competitive in the eDiscovery market. We are proud of the successful outcome of this project and grateful for the support of our team and partners.