What's The Use Case For FIMS Test And Learn?

One of the horror stories that seems to come up a lot in my world goes something like this: "I went into FIMS to do (something) and now it's all messed up!"  A lot of the time, these are big changes - significant modifications to the GL or affiliations, major imports, and the like.  Other times, it's a small change, like adjusting a grant, that suddenly throws things out of whack.  Another popular one is "We hired a new person and they broke something!"

These are all great reasons to use the Test and Learn database.  With Test and Learn, you can try things out without impacting your live database.  While it may take some time to set it up in the live database later, you can safely make big changes in Test and Learn, figure out if they worked, and move forward without having to undo any mistakes.  You can also use Test and Learn as a reference for recovery if things do go wrong in live for any reason.

Another use, which is probably my favorite for smaller organizations, is to leverage Test and Learn for parallel processing.  If you've got a time-consuming process that doesn't require monitoring, like a big report that takes a long time to generate, you can use the Test and Learn database to run the report while still working on other things in the live database.

Want to learn more about the Test and Learn database?  Check out all of our Test and Learn KB articles!  If you have any issues accessing your Test and Learn database, please reach out to Customer Support at 1-800-256-7772 or submit a case on Case Central.