Hi Epicor community,
We are thinking about documenting everything in terms of all of the customizations that have been applied.
We are also looking into code-revisioning as well.
So far we are not sure what is the best way to approach this regarding Epicor customizations and the code that has been injected into it over last 5 years.
Any ideas how to extract all and how store them in one place?
Regards,
I’ll start this chasm of a topic with my meager response 
I think the biggest thing to consider is that not all of the customizations are ‘equal’ in terms of import/export options and source-code components. E.g. - SSRS reports are totally different than BPMs and must be documented differently. I just don’t think there is a one-stop shop for storage, version control and documentation - at least not without some least-common-denominator style setup. But then again, I’m not really on the forefront of this topic and I use a directory structure and an Excel workbook to maintain my customization documentation and archive. There are only two developers here (me plus one) so it’s easy (and free) for us to so it this way.
As for collecting it all from inside ERP - there are a handful of topics here on where to query to find the various elements of BPMs, BAQs, and the like, and I even built an updateable dashboard that catalogs all the elements and allows me to remove them in bulk if i need to. A little bit of work for a few weeks will get you setup to catalog, review, and alter your customizations enough for upgrades for sure.
We’ve been trying to start a conversion with Epicor about this for over five years. I know they are listening, but we have not received any feedback, questions, concerns, or clarifications (official or otherwise) at this time.
As younger developers enter the market, they are used to having source control, continuous integration, monitoring, and automated deployment capabilities. Larger ERP companies like SAP provide training courses to encourage good DevOps practices. Microsoft is a large DevOps advocate for its entire product line, including low-code development environments. SalesForce has even built an online tool around DevOps replacing Change Sets, which is more akin to the Solution Workbench.
If you haven’t voted or commented on one of the oldest open Epicor Ideas, please let Epicor know how much this would help you keep your Kinetic system Kinetic system up-to-date.
Here’s one of the topics that I’m sure Mike was including in his handful…
Knowing what’s there is a start. I would include @jgiese.wci’s cool queries too.
But people are looking for a process and not just an inventory. Treating the database as source control is great until Epicor overwrites your Pilot for upgrades and you didn’t export your work, or you want to roll back a change, or have select users test a fix before releasing to others, or know when changes starts throwing errors before users call, or being able to compare versions (base to base, base to customized, customized to customized). These would be really nice tools to help keep us current.