Upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0.0 to 9.0.1

Our company is on an Iseries. We did the skip upgrade from version 7.2 .2.6 to 9.0.0.4

It was determined that we only wanted to "suffer the pain" one time, rather than do 2 upgrades. Factoring in such things as consultants, internal people, etc., drove our company to decide on the skip upgrade.

Our project lasted approximately 8 months. It certainly can be done quicker than that. We could not get all departments to work on it at the same time. Our HR/PR folks did their testing along with some from GL. After they were done, we did a refresh and our AP/CB/GL group did their own testing. After they were complete, another refresh was done and our AR group did their testing. All in all, I think we did 5 refreshes of the data so that the test environment was exactly the same as the live environment. People posted the same data into both environments and ran reports and inquiries for validation purposes. The testing tied up quite a few people because they were doing double duty. Running their daily jobs and then running them again in the test environment.

We did have to change our programs that either created interface files or that chained to Lawson databases. Lawson now stores dates as true dates, where before they were 8 position numeric fields.

We are still using laua for security but set people up to use either LID or portal. Our goal is to implement the newest version of security at some point down the road. People are still getting used to portal so the jury is still out on whether it is better than LID.

Our company chose to have consultants help us along the way, with both Lawson and non Lawson consultants being utilized.

We are in process with our upgrade, scheduled go-live November 22. We used the method of the two step upgrade. By the time the skip upgrade was available we had already completed two upgrade cycles and did not feel comfortable changing a process that worked well for us.

We did the initial upgrade/Install (new LPAR for 64 bit AIX, 9.01 apps) in May, we did application exploration and differences training with that upgrade cycle. We upgraded the data again in August for Integrated testing and once again for User Acceptance testing beggining of the month.  We will finalize our UAT testing next week with a Go/No Go decision on 11/5. We look to be a go.

Our biggest issues have been around security, we had to do some work to break the parent/child relationsips. A PT is being developed but we were getting security violations on forms in testing that PROD had no issues with.

Database changes overall are minimal. Verify the RQ500 layout, there was a couple of fields that were not documented as required that caused us a few hours of research time. We are also working through a few issues with the GHX inbound script for 810s. keep that in mind while testing to translate a file (we used one from PROD) to make sure that works.

If you have other specific questions let me know. I will try to update this as we go-live if there is any other lessons learned.

 

 

Skip Upgrade is better option if you don't have time but lots of work. Step Upgrade is OK if you lots of time.

We are Windows.

The skip upgrade is confusing to me. I see various documentation that stated that we could not go from apps 8.1 to 9.01...that we had to go to 9.0.0 first. Does the skip upgrade then allow you to go form 8.1 apps to 9.01 apps?

Is the skip upgrade such that you take the enviro from 8.0.3.7 to LSF 9.0.0.X and then enviro from 9.0.0.X to 9.01....then just do ONE apps upgrade ot 9.0.1?

Maybe this will clear things up for you.

There is no skip upgrade for environment. You set up a new environment 9.0.1.x or whatever environment you prefer on a preferably new server.

For application, you can do a skip upgrade from 8.0.3MSP12 straight to 9.0.1.x on windows platform

We went live back in July with our 9.0.1.3 environment and 9.0.1MSP1 application.

We setup a new environment 9.0.1.3 first. Then we performed skip upgrade on our application from 8.0.3MSP12 to 9.0.1MSP1

 

As a side note:

If you are on planning stage, I would go with 9.0.1.5 64 bit environment for windows. It supports Windows 2008 SP2, Websphere 7.0 and SQL 2008.

Another note on this topic, prior to September 11th, there were no skip upgrade programs available to upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0.1.

On September 11th Lawson made the 8.1 to 9.01 skip upgrade programs available.

"The Skip Upgrade programs for the Unix/Windows platform and the System I platform is now Generally Available for 8.1 to 9.0.1. These S3 Application upgrade programs allow customers that are on 8.1 applications to move to 9.0.1 applications. Customers using the skip upgrade programs must be on MSP 7 for version 8.1. Customers must also migrate to LSF 9.0.1 to upgrade to the 9.0.1 applications."

I'm not sure that I understand what the skip upgrade does for you. I heard that you could still go to the 9.0.1 from 8.1 apps w/o the skip upgrade..but that it would not be as easy.

We are about to embark on taking enviro from lsf 9.0.0 to 9.0.1 and then at the same time apps 8.1 to MSP7 then apps 9.0.1 - so fun times ahead!!

Anyone have any advice on our upcoming journey?

Steps in a 8.1.0 to 9.0.1 upgrade (highly summarized)

Using Skip Upgrade

1) Install 9.0.1 applications in a new product line
2) Run skip upgrade data conversion moving data from 8.1.0 database to 9.0.1 database

Using step upgrade

1) Install 9.0.0 applications in a new product line
2) Run data conversion moving data from 8.1.0 database to 9.0.0 database
3) Install 9.0.1 applications into product line created in step 1
4) Run Data Promotion Programs to promote data from 9.0.0 database format to 9.0.1 database format.

Issues with using the step upgrade are several. A big one is when the 9.0.1 applications are installed, overlaying the 9.0.0 applications. This results in a dbreorg and can (does) affect some large purchasing tables. The dbreorg can add a lot of time onto the overall process

Wow..now the skip upgrade looks like a God send!

(We are on HR & Financial Suites with Process Flow & EMSS) Windows

In regards to the 8.0.3.7 enviro upgrade since we were not willing to do 9.0.0 enviro & apps at the same time, I'm pretty sure it would look like this:

Phase I
enviro from 8.0.3.7 to lsf 9.0 - done

Phase II (Nov 30 - Mar 27) - Will this be enough time to get this done?

1) enviro from lsf 9.0.0 to 9.0.1
2) 8.1 msp 5 apps to 8.1 msp 7
3) 8.1 apps to 9.0.1 apps (via skip upgrade)

When we set up a new environment, how do we get all the environment related data (LDAP, GEN tables, LOGAN tables) migrated from the old environment to the new environment? Does Lawson provide a process or documentation or are we on our own? We will be going from LSF 9.0.0.6 to 9.0.1.5 and apps from 8.1.0.5 to 9.0.1.3.

Beverly,

Your timeframe of 5 months may be ok based on resources at your facility. We go live this weekend with Apps 9.01, LSF 9.01 64 Bit AIX. We are moving from 8.1 apps LSF 9. Our timeline was around 7 months. We had to plan around our fiscal year end (June 30), Audit (September) and holidays to get to the timeline we are on based on resource constraints of our users/testers.

December would be a good time to start the the upgrade with users out on holidays but consultants can intall and upgrade the data. You will also have to concider that 1099's and W-2 processing may take your users/testers away for a while in Jan.

We ran three complete payroll cycles between and integrated test and user acceptance test. I guess the more I write the more I think 4 months might be light but again my resources and their time to dedicate to the project may be more limited than yours.

We are in the process of an iseries 8.0.3.4 to 9.0.1.4 skip upgrade. Couldn't even consider trying to get budget approved for two back to back upgrades so skip was the only avenue to pursue. Took a bit of time to get the "official" word from Lawson on what skip upgrade programs were available but we have a good client rep who really came through with what we needed. We started late September with a prod and test environment installation and completed our intial upgrade the first part of November. Currently using LAUA security initially to get users testing quickly. Will eventually test and hopefully adopt the new Lawson security.

RE Norm's post....

If you do not own the skip upgrades and are forced to do the step (because of $$$), how do you handle the fact that you will likely do multiple passes of the upgrade for testing? Would it not be a good idea to have 3 productlines:
8.1 --> 9.0.0 --> 9.0.1

If not, once you "upgrade" the 9.0.0 apps to 9.0.1, and run the DPP's you no longer have a 9.0.0 target area to run your second pass in?

Make sense?

We did own the skip upgrade, we are using Ciber for the upgrade.

We just did our first test upgrade from 8.1.0.5 to 9.0.0.7 to 9.1.0.3 and I have the same question as David - once you upgrade your target product line from 9.0.0 to 9.0.1, how do you run multiple passes? I don't see how even having three product lines would do it.

Also, does anyone else have the issue we had where the dbreorg that runs in the 9.0.1 lawappinstall prompts for the name of a new work file when it fills the first one up? Our took more than three days to run and someone had to sit there watching it the whole time in order to respond to the prompts.

Chris / David: Did you already get your answer for how to do repeat passes? If not then I can tell you how we did ours. Since it's been a few months since your post maybe you're already past that point though.