We are currently on 10.2.600.11 and are going to begin the process of migration to Kinetic. My question is this:
Do we jump straight to the latest and greatest, or do we perform ‘step therapy’ and move up in increments?
Also, I see a lot of documents on EpicWeb about upgrading from Kinetic to Kinetic, but haven’t come across anything that discusses migrating from 10.x to Kinetic. Does any such documentation exist? I know that it came in quite handy with my 9 to 10 upgrade years ago.
EDIT: I realize now that the 10.x to Kinetic migration is basically the same as 10.1 to 10.2 migration. I just don’t know if there is anything 10.x specific that needs to be handled prior to the DB Migration.
I just did this analysis between 2024.1 and 2023.2 and decided on 2023.2. I installed them both and both worked, but I have heard of too many 2024.1 quirks that I am gun shy.
Mostly app studio and dashboard creation and I have over 400 dashboards, soo I am hoping that will improve.
And 2024 is active home page only and that would kill my older users, so I am taking the next year to show them the new and making sure they know the old menus are gone.
Go with the latest or very close to the latest. I would say anything prior to 2023 was unusable (unless you stay on classic ui). We are doing ok on 2023.2. I’m looking forward to taking advantage at some of the improvements in 2024.
I really need to dive into the whole Kinetic environment a bit more so I know what y’all are meaning when you use phrases like Active Home Page . I assume that is just the ugly tiled page that starts with the Kinetic client?
I know we are going to want to continue to use the Classic interface for as long as possible to help curb the learning process, just as with you and some of your users.
The little bit that I have played around with Kinetic (non-classic UI) has been discouraging at best for me, so I can only imagine how it is going to be for non-tech people. It scares the bejeezus out of me though, I can say that much.
Just jumped from 10.1.600 to 2024.1.15, was not difficult.
Do two user tests and should flush out any issues.
Received Not Invoiced had a few old receipts pop up.- Epicor Datafix
Routing Rules needed a data fix (two company issue)- Epicor Datafix
Updating the integrations were the time consumer for us.
Some rest updates in sales order, NULL value errors.
We upgraded with Classic screens, some cosmetic corrections we needed where new fields overlapped. Customization maintenance highlighted those.
Run the Analyzer Tool, that will highlight most of the issue and help understand what you’re up against.
We have no integrations, no EDI, no XLConnect, no 3rd party anything really, so we are in good shape there.
We have a whopping 45 Menu Customizations, only 30 of which are applied to a menu, and 45 total Method and Data Directives combined. A curosory glance of those customizations and BPMs shows that there is a lot of simplicity to them, which also bodes well for the upgrade process.
2024.2 App Studio has a Dashboard Wizard so I understand. I’m told it works well, but not 100%.
@jhecker I agree that 10.2 → 2023/2024 will work just fine. Almost all the BPMs and BAQ’s just work unless you have some serious custom code. You can stay on Classic screens for now and work on the App Studio Kinetic conversion later.
We went from 10.2.500 to 2023.2 (stayed on classic screens) earlier this year. 2023.2 seems very stable on classic but you may want to get a later version now.
We have hundreds of screen customisations, BPM’s, BAQ’s and about 50 custom screens/dashboards along with CRM, website and carrier integrations. We’re on prem so needed a SQL server upgrade, and a windows server upgrade as well. Took us about 3 months in total, but that was alongside other projects.
Overall it went very well, had minimal disruption to users and it was well worth doing. Our main issues were with our integrations, but more relevant for you:
Heavily customised or custom screens. Probably a good 50% of these didn’t open. Our developer was able to fix most of these very quickly, but it did need a developer.
Quite a few BPM’s failed, mostly with the ‘outdated directives’ error. Generally the ones I had done with the approved widget low-code approach broke, our developers ones which were mostly custom code were fine!
There were multiple small issues with the custom work but the answer for this is as the above comments - use the analyser tool and make sure users test every screen and every process. A few more specific errors just from memory:
Personalisation’s broke - recommend deleting all of these, as with every significant upgrade
Field labels on dashboards went back the default name, i.e. showed as ‘credit value’ in 10.2 but in Kinetic displayed as ‘epiLabel1’. Guaranteed to confuse users. I have a vague memory this was a bug that is either fixed on latest version or has a fix documented on Epiusers somewhere.
Don’t forget to manually copy any custom SSRS reports across… we used a solution - and then found out about Jose’s migration tool
Field security changes. Currency on the sales order was one of them, in 10.2 we had blocked users changing it (only allowed to do it a customer level), in Kinetic we had to change that or users couldn’t save the order. Took a while to work out what the issues was, so worth checking if you have changed any defaults, may cause issues.
I don’t know the details but we did have a permission issue with any screens using external BAQ’s - worth making sure these are carefully tested if you have any.
If you have new servers remember to install the barcode font, users dislike getting partnum’s when they are used to barcodes
And as above comment a few cosmetic screen changes where there’s new fields.
We also disabled the Classic and Modern menu options, and everyone now users the ‘Kinetic’ menu. Just so people realised we’d actually done something! Also seemed like a small easy way to start introducing Kinetic UX.
I’m sure these are all things you’d check anyway, but for what its worth. All the best.
Big if true. Most companies accumulate a fair number of dashboards and the auto-translation to the Kinetic version is of questionable value. Most dashboards with any level of complexity really deserve to be redesigned in Kinetic to really feel useful.
I know many of us are still “new” to Application Studio, but it takes way more time to create a dashboard than it used to in Classic. Plus, you still can’t copy them without a little jiggerypokery behind the scenes.
. I assume that is just the ugly tiled page that starts with the Kinetic client?
