Change Management Policy

The purpose of the Genesys Cloud API Change Management Policy is to articulate the agreement between our Genesys Cloud customers and partners and the Genesys Cloud development organization around the management and notification changes to our API resources. Our change process and relevant change types assume the responsibility of the API consumer to follow resilient rest API client best practices when utilizing the Genesys Cloud API.

The following methods of being notified of announcements made on the Developer Forum are available:

Use your favorite RSS reader to subscribe to the Developer Forum's Announcements Category RSS feed.

Programmaticaly access recent topics from the Developer Forum's Announcements Category as JSON data. Additional unauthenticated requests for topic content can be made using the Discourse API.

The Developer Forum can be used to subscribe to categories and receive digest emails with new topic activity. First, subscribe to the Announcements category by navigating to the category page and clicking the notification bell to open your notification preferences for that category. Watching or Watching First Post will notify you of new topics created in the category. Notifications will be shown when clicking on your profile image in the top right corner.

Next, enable the Activity Summary. This will send you a summary of activity on the forum at an interval of your choice. This setting is found in your preferences in the Emails section. Access this by clicking on your profile image, clicking on your username, and click Preferences to take you to your preferences page. Select Emails from the list on the right and configure the Activity Summary settings. Alternatively, Mailing list mode may also be used to receive emails forum activity in an alternate format.

To subscribe to Genesys Cloud Release Notes, see the Resource Center page Subscribe to Genesys Cloud Release Notes.

A non-breaking change is considered the extension of an existing API resource or the addition of a new API resource. These changes are expected to be backwards compatible and should not break well-formed applications following modern resilient rest API client best practices. These changes are expected to respect the following four rules:

1. MUST NOT take anything away
2. MUST NOT change processing rules
3. MUST NOT make optional things required
4. Additions MUST be optional

Examples of non-breaking changes are:

• Add properties to a response contract
• Add optional properties to a request contract
• Add optional query string parameters
• Add new API resources
• Add new request methods to existing API resources
• Add additional response headers
• Change documentation
• Increase or remove a rate limit

Breaking Changes are any changes that would result in an action by a consumer of the Genesys Cloud API to make changes to their code to avoid a disruption in service.

Examples of breaking changes would be:

• Remove a resource
• Change or remove HTTP response codes
• Remove a property in a request or response contract
• Change an optional request contract property to be required
• Rename properties in a request or response contract
• Change an API resource to use a different response contract
• Change a response to have a value outside of a documented range or format
• Remove a documented response header
• Add a required request header
• Decrease a rate limit
• Changing required permissions or adding a new required permission
• Changing the meaning of a value in an API request or response

Emergency changes may be either breaking or non-breaking changes. These changes are only made in very rare and extenuating situations to address security or stability risks found in any part of the Genesys Cloud platform.

Functionality in the Genesys Cloud API can be deprecated if it becomes unnecessary, unsafe, or outdated. Deprecated resources will maintain backwards compatibility until the resource is removed from our service. Genesys Cloud development for our Genesys Cloud API resources follows the standard Genesys Cloud feature deprecation process.

Genesys Cloud API changes are announced in one or more of the following locations:

• The Announcements category in the Genesys Cloud Developer Forum
• Posts to the @GenesysCloudDev Twitter account
• Genesys Cloud Release Notes on the Resource Center
• Deprecation announcements on the Resource Center

Every API change announcement will contain, at a minimum, a technical description of the change, an explanation of the impact, a list of impacted APIs, and the date the change will take effect.

For changes and improvements that do not cause any change in existing behavior, Genesys Cloud reserves the right to make change without advanced notice. Genesys Cloud Development will assess every non-breaking change for its potential impact to consuming client applications; any non-breaking change presenting potential impact to client applications will be announced at least 30 days in advance of when the change will take effect.

For changes and improvements that cause a change in existing behavior, announcements will generally be made 60 days in advance, with a mandatory 30-day minimum notice.

Major API version deprecation announcements will generally be made 18 months in advance, with a mandatory 12-month minimum notice. This applies to the deprecation of the entire API major version, currently v2, not individual resources within the API.

We take care to give ample notice of resource deprecation to give customers time to prepare if necessary. You will have at minimum of 90 days from the day we announce a deprecation before the feature or functionality is removed from our service. Development of the Genesys Cloud API resources follows the general Genesys Cloud feature deprecation process.

While our goal is to adhere to the policies outlined above, there are emergency situations that will require making changes without the required minimum notice. Breaking changes that violate the minimum notice rule will additionally be announced with a forum-wide banner advertising the announcement and in the Genesys Cloud release notes.