Best practices for maintaining production and UAT Templafy tenants

About this article

The target audience for this article is customers who have purchased a UAT tenant along with a production tenant. It will go through best practices for the transfer of templates/assets from UAT to production, switching from a UAT tenant to a production tenant in Templafy Desktop and within their office applications using Templafy provided registry keys and user management between the tenants.

• Purpose of production vs. UAT tenants
• Transferring templates and assets from UAT to production 
• Switching from UAT to production tenants

Purpose of production vs. UAT tenants

Production

Production tenants should be considered Stable environments which means as few edits to template and asset libraries should be made as possible.

UAT

UAT tenants (also known as test, staging or sandbox) should be considered working environments where content creators can maintain the current and new templates/company assets that end-users will use. UAT access should be limited to Admins and SuperAdmins such as brand managers, design staff,technical project managers and high-level IT staff. This environment is where templates can be created or updated without impacting production data.

Transferring templates and assets from UAT to production 

There are two ways of transferring templates between tenants, via .zip files and the backup and restore feature within the admin center.

Zip

Templates and company assets can be downloaded within the admin center in .zip format and then can be uploaded into another tenant. This article goes through that process.

Backup/restore

The backup and restore function within the admin center will take all templates, assets, file structures, data sources, and forms. This functionality will completely overwrite any data currently in the environment being restored with the environment being backed up. During a backup/restore, User Profile data, SSO setups, tenant specific settings and background data are all left untouched.

Release cycles can be established within your organization to coordinate when templates and assets are to be moved from UAT to production using one of the above methods. The release cycle is completely up to the customer to determine but we have seen customers with weekly, bi-weekly and monthly transfers but it really depends on how many templates and assets are being transferred at the time of release.

Switching from UAT to production tenants

In order to transition from your UAT tenant to production tenant and vice versa in Templafy Desktop and Templafy in Office, you will need to obtain the appropriate registry keys for each tenant from Templafy (reach out to your account manager for these files).

Once you have the two registry keys, the steps are below:

• It is important to remember that if you are switching from Production to UAT tenants that offline content will automatically get deleted. When switching from tenant to tenant, please make a copy of that folder. before doing the below steps to avoid downloading gigabytes of content every time you transition from UAT to production.
• It is also important to keep in mind that the configuration settings between the UAT and production tenants must be aligned in order to ensure seamless transitioning. If your newly purchased UAT tenant is more up-to-date, version wise, than your production tenant, it could result in unintended consequences with Templafy functionality. Consult your Templafy account manager or support staff if you want to upgrade your production tenant to match the configurations of the UAT tenant. Downgrading your UAT tenant to match your production tenant is not advised.

Steps to take:

1. Ensure single sign on is completed for your production tenant (customers should always make sure that their authentication method is always set up to use production settings)
   • Open Templafy Desktop and ensure you are logged in
2. Exit out of all Office applications
3. Terminate the TemplafyDesktop.exe process from the task manager (ensure it is not running in the background – see image below)

4. Run the registry key for your production Templafy tenant (or your UAT Templafy tenant if you are trying to switch back to the UAT tenant)
5. Launch Templafy Desktop and wait for the login to complete
6. Click “Check for updates” and wait until complete (switching to UAT for the first time will download the respective package for it, however it will be locally stored on your machine and any other time you try to switch it will be nearly immediate, unless there is a new package pushed)
7. Launch Office applications

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