Symphony Config/Code Promotion for Genesys Cloud
How Symphony’s code free automation unlocks your productivity from day one
The ability to move Genesys Cloud configuration from your development systems to higher systems such as your user testing or production systems is a critical process to fulfil a company’s “continuous improvement continuous development” (CICD) program. This involves gathering the configuration that has been created your Development Organization (Org), and then correctly transferring this to another Genesys Cloud Org; all the while paying attention to dependencies, pre-existing configurations and other factors that may impact the successful transfer.
Is CX as Code the right choice?
Currently, Genesys Cloud’s standard answer is to recommend Terraform scripting (aka CX as Code) to assist with the movement of configuration between Orgs. However, there are issues many customers find with this approach.
The Terraform product is notionally free to use, support contracts require an annual subscription as well as extra charges per configuration item being moved.
Secondly, Terraform requires customer and partner teams to understand how to use Terraform itself and have scripting development skills. The knowledge required is large and complex, requiring months of study, and further months of trials.
Many companies do not have Terraform skills in house, or in their teams relevant to the contact center, thus requiring developers to be recruited. Terraform is an extra layer of development skill needed on top of Genesys expertise that is not core to the creation of innovation – it does not help the delivery of better Customer Experience and is the type of legacy technical need many customers expect to leave behind in the move to SaaS.
These issues hamper the rollout of CICD for a business, increasing the time to value from decision to execution.
How Symphony solves the challenge
Symphony, from Blackchair, brings many powerful features that resolve the configuration promotion challenges. These include:
Proactive change tracking and audit – Symphony audits all of your Genesys Cloud Orgs for changes, and stores all of these in our datastore. This ensures you have up-to-the-minute configuration on Symphony. You can then compare and contrast different Orgs for discrepancies proactively enabling notifications and alerts when changes occur. You can also easily rollback changes that are mistakes. This ability to proactively audit and notify of changes along with roll-back to correct is not offered on Terraform.
Easy to use graphical interface – Symphony’s UI allows a user to easily gather the configuration objects that are required to be moved, and place them into an implementation “package”. This package can be reviewed ahead of execution, re-used and calibrated to accommodate the destination Org it will be sent to. Terraform does not enable peer review ahead of the implementation.
Knowledge of Genesys Cloud Configuration hierarchy and dependencies – Built into Symphony is the in-depth logic and knowledge of the data structure tree of Genesys Cloud. This means that Symphony understands what needs to be published first, second, third, etc. into a destination org. Symphony can also automatically gather flow dependencies and place them into the automaton package under user control. This removes the need for developers to understand how to code or hierarchies and focus on creating the best customer experience.
Automation – Symphony fully automates the publishing of configuration between orgs. It provides full detail of the activities it is conducting, delivering comprehensive logs and output to the user. By using Genesys Cloud’s own API it enables dramatically faster delivery of configuration compared to manual efforts.
Automation Scheduling – Symphony has a flexible scheduling system to enable automation packages to run at a pre-defined time. It also has a built in API allowing third party CI/CD platform to execute the packages.
Recovery and Rollback – Symphony automatically takes a backup of the relevant configuration before it is updated which can be used to quickly rollback those changes if required.
Notification and alerting – Built into the automation packages are notification options to provide details to recipients of the detail of the executed packages.
The benefits of using Symphony
Speed
Our customers regularly see delivery speeds in excess of 500% compared to manual or other methods. The ability to deliver more results can be realized by delivering these benefits directly to your bottom line and/or enable your already constrained resources to do more value based work instead of the mundane task of moving configuration between Orgs.
Accuracy
No more defects during the moving of code between orgs. Symphony guarantees that the config you want to move is accurately transported without error
Recovery
Whenever you execute an automation package, Symphony scans the target system to gather the state of the design before it writes a single line of config. This detail it stored by Symphony automatically. This ensures the ability to rollback and recover from automation packages and return the target Org to its pre-execution state.
Simplicity
our “no code” approach to building and running packages means your teams can start using Symphony from the very first day it is deployed. No extensive training or recruiting specialist skills to build a CICD pipeline. Symphony provides user interface training, use case handbooks and round the clock support.
How easy is it to use Symphony?
Once your developers have built and completed their testing of a call flow or other configuration in your Genesys Cloud dev Org, the next step will be to move this configuration from dev to your lab or production org. The user simply does the following:
- Open up Symphony’s user interface
- Select the configuration objects to be included in the move. The user interface makes it simple to find and select the needed objects and will automatically find dependencies if requested.
- Add these items to an “implementation package” using a simple mouse click.
- Advanced options such as sequencing, field overrides, execution rules (i.e. what to do if an object already exists in the target system) and many other controls are available if needed, allowing the user to fully calibrate the automation package to suit their needs, although the default settings are suitable for most implementations.
- The user can then select the target Genesys Cloud org to send the contents of the automation package to. They use their own user IDs and authentication to ensure full audit record accountability.
- Packages can then be
- executed immediately
- scheduled to run automatically at a specific date and time
- stored for external execution from a third party DevOps framework such as Jenkins or Azure.
- Once the package has run, a full recorded history of the package log is available to view. Notifications are also sent to pre-selected stakeholders or groups. Furthermore, within the package history, there is the option to instantly create a “rollback” package. Therefore, if the package did not deliver the expected business outcome or there was some other issue, the user can quickly recover the situation by running the rollback package. This restores the design to pre-execution state.
… And much more!
Symphony is designed as an CX enhancement solution for your entire enterprise. From your day to day operational teams as well as your business users, Symphony can simplify and accelerate your ability to respond to demands and reduce workload.
Summary
Symphony, by Blackchair, is a powerful and cost effective way to enable a CICD pipeline with immediate results from the day it is deployed. Blackchair’s 20 years of knowledge and experience in the CX management industry is contained within Symphony, allowing your business to increase its productivity in excess of 500%.
