Hi all,
I am curious as to how companies that have been on the Cloud with Epicor for the past year or longer have been handling the Major upgrades that happen twice a year. Have they been nothing to really worry about or has anyone really had to create a big testing script to run against their Pilot database prior to the upgrade of their LIVE database?
The upgrade coming up on April 8th to our Pilot database will be our first Major upgrade since going live on January 24th. Just want to know what to prepare for and what other companies are doing with the testing of their Pilot database prior to the upgrade being applied to their LIVE database.
Any suggestions, tips, words of warning, etc. would be appreciated.
I’ve been away from SaaS for a couple of years but we started on 10.2.100 (from 10.0.700 on Single Tenant) and we went up to 10.2.500 before I left. The saying is true, the more often you do something, the more efficient you get at it. Over the first two, we learned some things (like locking users out and saving dev work in Pilot ahead of time) but the last three went really smoothly and the users were good at the upgrades and it wasn’t a big deal anymore. No Foolin’
These are the general steps:
Attend the Preview Webinars to learn of the new features to test
Back up your dev work in your Pilot prior to the Pilot Upgrade
Use a Test Plan to validate the new version. We used Planner/Tasks in O365. We created a template plan and would just duplicate it each time. New items are added to the template to improve the plan. The nice thing about Planner/Tasks is you can assign items with dates and capture feedback. The Planner/Task was hosted in an Epicor Upgrade Team in teams. All documentation, screenshots, test results were posted in the Team by version number.
As close as we could get to the Pilot upgrade, we would run reports in Live: General Ledger, Stock Status, Open AP, Open AR, Deferred Revenue, … basically the balance sheet stuff.
After Pilot was upgraded, we ran the same reports to make sure nothing had change financially.
As you fix items in Pilot (screen collisions, etc,), add them to a Solution.
For things that just don’t work, report them to Epicor immediately.
On upgrade weekend, pick a shutdown time. Lock non-Security Manager accounts out. We did this with a BAQ and DMT.
Run the same Pre-Upgrade reports that were done previously.
Go to a movie. Read a book. Get some rest.
On Sunday, you’ll get the notification that the upgrade is complete.
Apply the Solution that you created during the Pilot Phase.
Rerun your reports and check for differences.
Enable the users using DMT
Release the system to some or all of the users.
For those using the .Net Client, the upgrades happen on their next login.
Thanks Mark! That helps! I have sent out an email to our super users asking for their ideas on what we should be testing. I agree that over time it will become 2nd nature to us.
I did read over the Pre-Release info and it doesn’t look like anything will really affect us but you just never know.
Have a wonderful day! Love the paper clip with the Dad jokes:>)
Hi Mark,
Just wanted to give you an update. We survived our first Major upgrade with very little to fix this morning. Just a few personalization errors and a Report Data Definition I had to fix. Otherwise it has been going well. Thank you for all your help, support, encouragement, etc. Hope to see you next week at Insights!!
Unfortunately I can’t say the same. We found a major problem during testing, and support was unable to resolve it before the update was pushed out. This is the first upgrade in years that has gone this badly.
Sorry to hear that Evan. The only major problem we had during testing was our MRP would not run. I was nervous last night that I would have the same issue. So far so good. Hope your issue gets resolved quickly and you can move on to better times.
We have a workaround, but its pretty stupid. Numerous things on the quote screen don’t work if the quote wasn’t created by a security manager. If it was, anyone can modify it without error. So we’ve had to make the sales manager a security manager and he will have to create quotes for everyone.
I have to try not to just sit around today and watch the paperclip. Thanks for the laugh today!!
