Tenant Management, Releases, and Audit
Tenant landscape
Workday environments include Implementation (initial build), Sandbox (configuration and testing), Production (live), and Preview (an early, read-mostly look at the upcoming release). Sandbox can be refreshed from Production; Production is never refreshed from Sandbox. Preview is not a configuration environment - any option that proposes building or testing configuration there is wrong.
Releases land twice a year, typically in March and September, with Preview available weeks earlier. Start with the release notes and setup impact summaries; anything with a required action should be tested in Sandbox and, where relevant, adopted early in Preview.
Audit
Workday captures change history in three ways:
- Audit trail on individual business objects: field-level before and after values, with who and when, viewed from the record itself.
- Security and sign-on audit for authentication events and permission changes.
- Audit-based reports for bulk review, such as what changed in a period or who holds a permission.
Audit data is append-only: it cannot be deleted or backdated. Any option that offers to clear the audit log is a distractor.
Traps: assuming an audit trail exists for every field (only audited fields are tracked); confusing a business process instance's status history with the object's audit trail; forgetting that a retroactively effective change still generates an audit entry stamped with the moment it was entered.
Rule of thumb: configure and test in Sandbox, document the change, then apply in Production - and review What's New before each release rather than after.