Next VS Practice | Sandbox Environments Explained

Release notes Highlights. Okay, Next. Okay, this is another y' all item. We have the ability to switch from the Go environment to the Next and Practice environments in the Office side. And this one I want to pause on and do some explaining. So, Service Titan, the Live account that you work in every day, that is the Go environment. You see it in the URL go.servicetitan.com Most of you, if you've been around a while, are also aware of the Next environment, which is a sandbox environment, which you previously had to get to by just typing in next.servicetitan.com so you had to know already that this sandbox existed and you had to know the URL to get to it, which is not particularly user friendly and inconsistent with the mobile side, which does have a button to switch to Training mode, which is the next environment. So now on the Office side, from your profile dropdown, you will have a button to switch to the Next environment, but you can. You also have a button to switch to the Practice environment. This was a big problem. Most people didn't know that the Practice environment even existed. That's practice.servicetitan.com Next and practice are intended for two separate things. The Next environment is called Next because it gets the next upcoming release sooner than your Live account. So the Next environment is intended for training on the upcoming release features. And that's it. That's the one thing that Next is intended for. It's not intended for just general training and practice. The Next environment isn't particularly stable. It's kind of slow. You probably won't have a great time spending like a lot of time in there if that's like your main place to go do training. That's what the Practice environment is for. The Practice environment is more stable, plus it's got the current release in it that's in your Live account. So it's probably better if you're just trying to train somebody to train in that. And the Next environment refreshes its data once per week. So so once per week it goes and takes a snapshot of your Live account and sucks all of that data into the Next environment. And that new snapshot of data is going to overwrite everything in the next environment, including any changes that you made over the previous week. So some people would use the Next environment to like work on building out a price book. Bad idea. You can lose a lot of work that way. The Practice environment only updates its snapshot with every release, which happens approximately monthly. So data does still get overwritten in there. If you're gonna use it for something like building out a price book. You still need to be exporting that regularly to avoid losing any work, but that happens on a monthly basis versus a weekly basis, so your risk of losing work is reduced. Now, don't take that as an endorsement for that use case necessarily. I don't know that I fully recommend using Practice or Next or any sandbox environment for building out a price book, but it is definitely an option. I just want you to understand how everything works so that you can make an informed decision for yourself. And by the way, this change does carry over to the mobile side, so the training mode nomenclature has been removed since that's contradictory to what we call it on the office side, the Next environment, and it's just confusing. And techs now also have the option to either switch to the next environment or the practice environment. Hey, thanks so much for watching. Mighty kind of ya. If you want to check out the full release Notes video, here's a link to it right around here. Or if not, here's another video I think you might enjoy. I'm just gonna sit here and stare at you until you pick one. That's right. Go on. Okay, Interesting choice.