Are you ready for the Cornerstone October Release?

With the October ’19 release, Cornerstone continues to build on its commitment to customers and their users. 

Administrators will find a lot be happy about, with a lot of time saving enhancements that remove some of the tedious, repetitious tasks that admins love to hate. Employees will find some tweaks that make their interactions with Cornerstone easier and more intuitive. 

We recently reviewed the changes in the most recent First Look documents. Here are some of our favorites: 

HR Suite. There is some welcome help for data integrity with the ability to require entries in custom fields. 

For customers using the employee record change outbound feed, we have new filenames that make it easier to track schedule changes that have completed. You will need to review and update any integrations that receive the feed to accommodate the new files and file names. 

Recruiting. Internal Career Sites (early adopter) enhances your internal mobility by allowing employees to apply to internal opportunities. They can browse competencies to find roles that fit their skills and interests. 

Learning. A lot of enhancements here, including biometric support for logins, LinkedIn learning subject synchronization, and self-registration support for SalesForce. Our favorite is the introduction of Level 1 evaluation tags in course completion emails that enable learners to respond to evaluation requests directly from the email. We would want to measure changes in the response rates and hopefully see a positive trend. 

Performance. Now would be an excellent time to make the transition to the Development Plans redesign if you haven’t done so already. The redesigned tool will be the only development plan for all clients with the May ‘20 release. Everyone will have personalized development available on their mobile devices, including personalized recommendations driven by machine learning. 

Compensation. If you self-activate Currencies Redesign, you will have a mobile responsive design supporting all ISO currencies. You can see which currencies are active or inactive and easily update rates and precision. 

Reporting. We especially like the enhancement to Reporting 2.0 (early adopter) that allows us to create custom column headers. It makes reporting more natural by allowing you to use terminology that’s familiar to the people in your organization. 

Getting Ready 

If you aren’t an “old hand” at managing releases (or perhaps if you are) we recommend watching the Release Ready video, where Bree Boettcher of GMR Marketing shares her tips on managing Cornerstone releases. She suggests downloading the Release Matrix and assessing the impact of each of the changes that affect your platform. She uses a color-coding system to keep on top of what’s most important. 

In her presentation, Boettcher strongly recommended two things that we think will make or break an update in your organization: 

• A well-planned communication effort to make sure there are no surprises for anyone. In our experience, you will be most successful when you communicate about changes just before users began using each function. Since you can’t be there beside every user all the time, you will need to communicate frequently enough that the enhancements are top of mind when they are ready to use them. 
• Thorough User Acceptance Testing so you’re not caught off guard by any of the changes. 

We also recommend you get involved in the online update community discussions. 

All the guides and resources are on the Success Center website. Just go to the welcome page and click on RELEASE/PATCH INFO. 

We wish you a happy and smooth Cornerstone update.