Hi Everyone!
The DS Academy has published a new whitepaper on Upgrading from Connections 6.5 to 7.
Many thanks to Matthias Schneider, Dejan Menges, Gayle Thiel, and Wannes Rams for your time and effort on this document. We hope that the community finds value in it.
Enjoy!
Tiffany Amos
DS Academy Program Manager
Hello,
thanks for the effort, creating this document. I'm not happy with the approach you are taking for the upgrade procedure.
You do a copy and then update approach which is, in my opinion, not a good way to upgrade quality or production systems as the process is not repeatable. What when something goes wrong? You need to do the whole process again. You never know where you did something wrong: during data migration, installation, or update.
I would prefer a side-by-side migration which will first install the new product from scratch, which you can test, then do a data migration. If something does not work, you know, it was the data migration and you can easily repeat this step without doing the installation again.
The second thing I found was the missing of the migration of the Elasticsearch index orient-me-collection.
Without this index, the OrientMe page will be empty after the migration, which our customers would not accept. I know HCL does not provide the necessary script but the quickresults migration script can easily be adapted to migrate this index.
A short side node for everyone who reads this: According to HCL the recommended iFix for WAS is 8.5.5.19. In the document version, 8.5.5.18 is used. HCL just updated Flexnet lately to provide iFix 8.5.5.19.
Martin
Hi Martin,
thanks a lot for pointing us to these important parts that need clarification, correction and update.
Regarding your points:
Technically spoken, you can do a side-by-side upgrade the way you describe for the WebSphere-based part. Which means: On a second machine, you'd install Connections 7 with its own set of file data and databases. Then, you incrementally upgrade the source databases in the sequence of versions and CRs using the delivered scripts. You switch (or mirror) the file share, replace the databases and the system should run with the existing data. In a last step, customizations and configuration need to be tested and applied. In case you have a well-documented system with all changes made in the XMLs (like file sync, policies, proxies…) on digital paper, this approach has many pros. The guide indeed focuses on the in-place strategy with automatic config transition, but we will review your points and option.
For the Component Pack part, it is a little more complicated, but the paper also provides an overview about what needs to be done in a side-by-side scenario.
Thanks a lot for pointing me to that OM collection in ElasticSearch, I will discuss that with the team and will add pieces that we might have missed.
With WAS FP19...you are right, this one should be used with Connections 7. At the time this paper was written, FP18 was current and the same base line for both 6.5 CR1 and 7. Today, FP19 should be applied either before or after the upgrade.
Matthias
@Martin Schmidt presented at Lotusphere 2014 how to perform a Connections upgrade using side by side migration. We call it a Klassiker :-)
Please take a look at it if you wanna learn more about this approach in general.