It’s pretty much solo over here for this sort of thing. My team handles a lot of the fallout if there is any, and the distribution of the client beforehand, but I spend my weekend battling the inconsistencies during doing these upgrades.
Back on 9, things were bad, real bad, for patching or upgrading. But on 10 it’s better. However not as good as I hoped. Each iteration of the platform gets better in some respects and harder in others. And it seems that I’m right there in the sweet spot of everything being a PITA.
And yes - we are “On Prem”. And too small a footprint to make the move to the cloud cost effective…
Here’s just a few things
Clients - every client has it’s own directory, and version and while they are designed to coexist - there must be an easier way to distribute/upgrade. I want to go from 10.x.x.x to 11.x.x.x but I want my clients to update like going from MS Office 2010 to Office 2016. I must be missing something but I don’t have time to figure it out.
SSL Certificates - self signed or not - something always goes wrong with the DNS Endpoint and Certificate Name that has me chasing my tail for an hour… it must be the fact that we try to use wildcard certs and Epicor doesn’t like them.
Dev, Docstar and HCM - need a dedicated Appsever or two. This is fine, except you have to upgrade these as well.
Training, Demo or others? How may Appservers on those?
How about CSF packs? Two - yep two. Database scripts and an install into each of 12 companies because you just can’t make it so it installs one time???
All in all, I have 12 appservers that need to be upgraded, and 4 databases, two language packs, two CSFs, DocumentSender (CSG), roughly 100 updateable BAQs, roughly 90 UI customizations and roughly 130 dashboards. And all the other little stuff, this took me 14 hours - and it should have been 4 except for the stupendous about of duplicate work involved across appservers and companies - and waiting for a client to process all of those Dashboards/UI Customizations - couldn’t that be done on the server? I mean, I kind of understand why it has to work the way it does…
And I certainly understand why this is all like it is - multiple versions, databases, customizations on menus unique to everyone - top to bottom, the system is universal - and I love it for that reason - but I also hate it sometimes. It’s jut getting worse the more moving pieces that are in play.
I cannot wait for the Kinetic thing to work and be browser based!!!
I’m tired, and I’m going to take a nap.
Hope you all had a great holiday!!
and seriously - be happy to discuss it with anyone who is facing a similar challenge…
We went with the client on a terminal server to insulate us from all the issues for the client level install. This is still a challenge though. I also look forward to the day when we can toss the terminal servers and have everyone connect through the app server directly but many challenges to overcome with the client level configurator…
@Gberg Nothing in particular - I really was just mentioning the process includes vetting and testing all of those in the Development environment before the Prod upgrade - and testing requires a lot of transactions. Lot’s of time involved b/c Epicor cannot guarantee that they will upgrade without issue (I assume it’s b/c of custom code).
Also, the update/cnv program that runs for updating updateable BAQs to the new version complains about a handful of mine. I have some custom BPM events coded in there and I guess it just couldn’t handle them at the conversion level. They all seem to work afterwards, so shrug not sure what’s up.
@MikeGross Sorry I missed this post. You did your upgrade the same weekend I did mine - but we went to 10.2.700, not Kinetic yet. Ditto on the solo work.
I laugh that you say your company is small - that’s a lot of servers and add-ons!
@MikeGross We need to start a group to do go live prep and cleanup. I would gladly help with that kind of an effort. The education for the next go round for any of us solos would be invaluable.
you know what, it would be great for this to be a whole section. Then each user doing and upgrade could start a progress thread titled [version] to [version] by [target date] and create a repository of lessons learned.
Last update I promised I’d go back and document all the Things and just never had a slow day since. Onenote is only sort of searchable.
@SteveFossey - this site really doesn’t have sections just topics, and we know how messy they can get. Shall we ask the gods for our own topic or if there is something we don’t know about that would work for this? @bderuvo@jgiese.wci
I wasn’t intending to start a whole ‘thing’, but as I sit here and think about it I like the idea more and more. I’m one who documents a lot of things, but in a very personal way. I suspect that each of does this to some extent and that others would surely benefit from the work if we just cleaned things up a bit.
but it does! Right now the sections are product-based, with a seldom used “frequent flyer” section nobody uses and an off-topic section only the cool kids hang out in.
But I’m thinking of something like a group-coaching entrepreneurship program where a user has a single topic they journal their work in and everyone pitches in if they can help. No dumb questions and all that, sort of the opposite of stackoverflow where they all pile on and beat you up if you don’t first read the whole internet.
This is were tags would come in. Add a tag for upgrade and you can get them through the search.
Unfortunately, almost everything gets rolled into “upgrade” since everything is changing, so that line is more like a blurry 30 foot wide sliding gray scale.
We could just use GitHub pages or, if we feel pretty, use Microsoft’s Doc Authoring Pack (VS Code extensions) to create Microsoft like documentation with the ability to have user suggestions. Just a thought.
Cloud Users Don’t Have To Do
