As Yardi begins to ramp down their support for Voyager 6.0, there has never been a more critical time to upgrade to their current 7S environment. Here is our basic Yardi 6 to 7S Upgrade Checklist.
An Upgrade may seem straight forward, there are some key critical considerations organizations must make to ensure the upgrade to this newest, feature-filled version runs smoothly so that business operations are not affected.
Why Upgrade?
In addition to the fact that 90 percent of Yardi’s clients have now upgraded to 7S (and that you may be the last few left behind), there are several reasons why it’s time to pull the trigger and upgrade to 7S. The tool is now completely a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, meaning that Yardi now takes on the responsibilities of hosting all infrastructure and hardware. This allows them to patch and upgrade the software on their own, reducing the dependency on any on-site resources on your team, thus freeing up valuable time for other tasks.
Things to Know Before/During an Upgrade
- If you are using Yardi 6.0 self-hosted on premise, you will be required to migrate to 6.0 Cloud (SaaS) before you can upgrade to 7S. Plan for additional time for the exercise, as it will require a database migration, testing, and overnight deployment to complete. A Yardi specialist team will be assigned to you to help facilitate the entire process from beginning to end.
- Once you are ready for the 7S upgrade, you will need to sign up for a 7S Upgrade webinar (which occurs every few days). After you register with your organization name and complete the short webinar, you can officially request to be added to the 7S upgrade process. At this point, Yardi will assign you an upgrade team which will assist in seeing you through the upgrade and completion of testing to go live.
- There is no cost associated with the upgrade from the Yardi side.
- Custom objects and scripts will need to be ported and updated before moving to the new environment. It is recommended that you leverage a Yardi partner to assist in getting all necessary development items converted and moved to the new environment
- Menus that you use in version 6 (standard or custom) cannot be brought over to 7S. All new menus are required – and this is where you can expect to spend the bulk of your time prior to testing.
- There are a series of complexities in the upgrade, such as security, roles, workflow, testing, etc., that are not included in the Yardi support for the upgrade. It is recommended you work with a knowledgeable Yardi partner to help guide you through the process. The Saxony team can help broker the conversations between your staff and Yardi to ensure the upgrade goes smoothly and in time all the while not disrupting operations.
- The most important part of an upgrade is testing. Be sure to allocate ample time for detailed testing of each section, as well as full system testing at major milestones of the upgrade. It is not uncommon to find an item or two that does not work exactly as intended. Catching these issues early will give you the opportunity to remediate them before users get in the system to do their day-to-day jobs.
Yardi Voyager 7S also comes with better navigation, fixes to old outstanding bugs, and adds a large set of new tools and functionality to help run your real estate business.
Upgrading the software from 6 to 7 is not as simple as flipping a switch and changing the version number. There are many moving parts and small details that require configuration and set up.
Yardi 6 to 7S Upgrade Checklist