LC20: Upgrading to Maximo 7.6.1.2

The following automated transcription is from our 2020 Lunchcast Series. For a copy of the PowerPoint presentation, please contact us.

0:03

Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us for lunch today. We hope everyone is doing well.

0:08

I’m Kat Pullen, Marketing coordinator at Ontracks and your maitre D for today.

0:13

Our special today we’ll cover the end of service announcement from IBM for seven for maximal 7 dot 6 dot 0 and upgrade considerations for 7 dot 6 dot 1 dot 2.

0:25

Our informal lunch cast events are held every Thursday, and we have invited several IBM folks and members of our team to discuss Maximo topics.

0:35

We will be meeting the phone lines during the event.

0:37

If you have a question, please enter it into the Chat box below, and we will answer them toward the end of the presentation.

0:44

This launch cast is being recorded, and the link will be made available shortly after the meeting.

0:50

Your server today is Jeff Yasinski, Principal Consultant here at on tracks.

0:56

Jeff has over 10 years of maximal implementation.

0:58

Experience is also experienced in maximum upgrades and migration maximal industry solutions, maximo solution, Enterprise integrations to ERP Systems, Configurations, Customizations, and Training.

1:19

Again, we do invite you to type your questions into the Q and A box at any time, and we will answer them toward the end of the presentation.

1:28

So, Jeff, what’s for lunch?

1:31

Thanks, Qat, welcome, everyone, just going to share my screen here.

1:35

Care, if you want to just confirm that my screen is showing, it is showing, and it is in the full slide view.

1:47

Perfect. So you see my agenda, OK, perfect. Awesome. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for attending. We’ve got some slides to kind of go through here. What we’ll be talking today is really about maximum of 761, you know, I guess particularly how are we going to get there. How are we going to upgrade the system? What are all the considerations for that? So we’ve got a little bit of an agenda here. So we’ll, we’ll talk about the maximal 76 0 and of support information. So I just want to repeat that 76 0, not 761. We’ll talk a little bit about maximal eat. You know, of course, that’s, you know, one of the big topics of discussion recently, of, course, you know, without release, what’s happening next year with it.

2:34

So I’ll briefly touch on that, and then kinda move on. We’ll talk about the release details and upgrade considerations for moving from, you know, 75 or 76 0 to 761.

2:50

We’ll talk through the typical upgrade process and what that entails and the variety of different steps that are needed to move your environment from one version to another. We’ll look at the roles that are needed in an upgrade. You know, I guess there’s, there’s quite often, there’s quite a few folks that are involved on a team that are involved in an upgrade, will look at some of those roles, and you know, what, what the details for that is we’ll look at exactly what the 761 release looks like. I think, you know, hopefully a lot of you folks have seen that already, what that looks like. But we’ll kind of do a little bit of a review on what that is.

3:29

And then lastly, we’ll open it up for a Q&A Session at the end, Right.

3:36

OK, so, actually, yeah, so fairly recently, so on September eighth of 2020 or this year, IBM did announce that all maximal 7, 6 0 products, including industry solutions and add ons, was going to be out, at, you know, announced out of Support, OK. So what they have given everybody, or, you know, customers, is a year to ultimately move to a newer version, OK? I guess, that newer version meeting, 76 1, so, effective September 30th, 2021, Any fixes, patches, telephone support are really no longer provided for maximal 76 0.

4:19

OK, and this does include its corresponding components add ons of that scene version, OK. So, what that means is, if, you know, if you have a product issue past that date, if you do need to submit a service request or a … for that product, or even have questions about that product that you submit service, request the IBM about. Or for the, you know, ultimately, it’s not in support anymore. IBM does offer an Extended Support or service contract, but, of course, that is an additional cost to your current licensing.

5:01

So, of course, you know, my, My Margin, you know, our big recommendation is, you know, if you are on a version, that’s not going to be supported. You know, even if you’re on maximal 75, which is able to support, if you’re on 76 0, which is going to be out of support, you know, we certainly recommend start looking at that upgrades, you know, start the planning process. And we’re going to talk a lot about the planning, and know that the step by step process here, in today’s session.

5:30

I do want to talk a little bit about the maximal timeline here. Because it does, kind of, it’s an interesting picture, I suppose, So, right now, we really have two different streams of release. So we’ve got maximal seven dot X, and I guess one could argue that there’s two different streams within the seven dot X release, but we’ll kinda roll it all into a single, know, I guess, a single stream here. And then we’ve got the maximum of eight point extreme. OK, so talking through the Maxwell seven point X, so, you know, back in April of 2011 maximal 75 was released. You know, 76 0 was released, December of 2014. You know, IBM did announce the end of support for maximal 75 was April of 2017. 761.

6:23

released was July of 2018, sort of just a few years ago, not too far back. 7611, which was feature packed number one for the 761 release, was introduced May of 2019. July 2019 was released, or the feature pack for 7 6, 1 2 was released, and then more recently, the 76 0 and of support was announced or will be September of 2021.

6:55

OK, so, I guess, you know, a couple of things that I always, you know, I like to find interesting, obviously that, you know, take it with a grain of salt. It doesn’t mean too much, but, you know, it, it looks like, you know, 6 to 7 years that a, you know, a product is in.

7:11

So, you know, I guess you could do some math on the 7, 6 1 release and see where that data ends up right Now. Of course, you know, I want to make it very clear that the 761 dot X end of support date has not been announced. And, you know, IBM will continue to support that release for further, that, near, for the future, for sure, until that’s that and to support is announced. OK, so, so, maximum eight points or eight point X, which is really called the maximum Application Suite, So there’s been three versions released for that to date. So, it was initially released this year, so June of this year, so eight point always released or a zero point zero eight zero point one was released, August of 2020, and then 8.2 was released August of 2000 or, sorry, October of 2020 of this year.

8:07

OK, let’s let’s let’s talk a little bit about Maxwell application suite. I know this session is not going to be about maximum application suite, I guess there’s a, there’s A few reasons for that. But, you know, ultimately, this session is about upgrading to maximum 76, 1 dot X, or 76 1 2, which is the current release that’s out there that you can go up to right now.

8:33

Know, so the maximum application suite, or mass is really a combine offering that includes multiple applications from the maximal portfolio, OK? So there’s a, there’s a number of products are that are going to be included in this portfolio, and that’s going to be monitor. I guess some of those products are monitor health, predict visual inspection. So, IBM has currently released those into the maximum application suite. Those were included in the eight zero point zero eight zero point one in eight point two releases. OK, and I get, I guess, the reason why I wanted, You know, I bring this up, is, you know, the Manage components, which, you know, I think, I would suspect that a lot of you are, you know, very, very well aware of it, which is the, you know, the asset management components of maximo.

9:25

You know, the general, you know, the assets, locations, work, orders, things like that, which were used to, you know, that doesn’t release until next year, OK, So that the timeline and the roadmap for that shows that it is an eight point X release. We’re not sure, you know what, that number is going to be.

9:48

Know, likely, it’s going to be 8.3 or zero point four, but that’s not going to be released until Q 2 of 2021. So, somewhere around, you know, the May timeframe is when that’s gonna be released.

10:01

OK, so, the, I guess, the, for this particular session, you know, until it’s, you know, we’re closer to the release, and we start understanding what that upgrade path looks like. We’re not going to focus on that. So, the, really, the focus is to move to the currently supported version, which is 761.

10:25

So, 1, 1 quick disclaimer, as we’re talking through a few, you know, the process here is, you know, every, you know, I guess, every in, every upgrade is similar, in approach. You know, the technical approach is very, you know, it is nearly identical, OK? But every upgrade is different. I guess there’s a lot of different reasons why every upgrade is different, and we’ll kind of talk about those, but this process has not been tailored to your environment. So, you know, as part of the planning process, and we’ll talk about all the planning steps, is, a lot of special consideration needs to be taken for your particular system, OK? So, integration has a big impact on an upgrade, right? You know, how the data flows to and from the different systems.

11:12

If you’ve got a financial system, you know, you want to take a lot of care and special attention in testing. So, perhaps, if you’ve got a, you know, a large integration to, for example, Oracle, Oracle, EBS, you’re going to need to do a lot of testing. So, you’re testing time is going to be extended for that project, OK. You know, data also has a big impact on this. The, you know, you may have multiple millions of war quarters which increase the time to run the upgrade tools. So your cutover plan needs to be decided or cheap. So, we’ll talk about a little bit of this, but really, you know, this is a, it’s a typical process, and, you know, like, I said, every upgrade is different. So, some things do you need to be tweaked changed, Of course. Alright.

12:03

So, to talk about some, you know, the considerations for an upgrade and this is, you know, part of the planning phases. You know, when you’re upgrading to any version of maximal. So if you’re on 75 versus 76, 0, 2, you know, even if you are on 761, and you’re planning to release a feature pack, which brings you from 76 1 0, 27612, You know, you want to take all of these into considerations, you know, the more versions that you do jumped.

12:33

Of course, there’s more impact, and there’s more things that you have to consider, and we’ll talk a lot about those things, but, know, I, I guess all of these things need to be taken into. Consideration.

12:43

OK, so the current version and upgrade path, this is something that really should be documented, you know, the minimum version requirements, prior to upgrading, there’s always gonna be a path for those, you know, those different versions. Right. This has, you know, I guess versioning has a heavy impact on the industry solutions as well. So every industry solution or add an also has a upgrade path to its number of users. So that, that, that’s certainly a consideration you need to take into, you know, to look at. So the system architecture, you know, how many clusters do you have? You know, really, how many concurrent users do you have? Do you have, you know, hundred concurrent users, and you’re gonna need multiple JVM to load balance the, the user interfaces to that number of users. Right? You know, so the installation time to create those servers, and the number of servers, and the cost of, you know, provisioning those servers is going to be larger, right? Industry solution out onto, I briefly mentioned that. Integrations, This is a big one, Right? You know, the number of integrations that you have is going to increase your testing time.

13:58

It may increase your remediation time as well, especially if you’re going from 75 to 76. 1, You know, there was database changes, or table changes, which may impact your integration objects, right, 76 0 to 761, while there was a, it’s not as big of a change, there still is some, you know, some minor database changes that happened as part of that versioning change, Java customizations. So, if you’ve got any Java customizations, you certainly want to look at those, right.

14:33

You know. These are anything that you’ve changed the out of the box logic. You know?

14:38

Back before automation scripts were available in maximo Java customizations, that was the way to change maximo ultimately. You know. In 7175, you know, quite often, you saw a lot of Java customizations because there was no other option to change some of that logic.

14:59

Size and database complexity. So, really, this is going to impact the time to complete the upgrade scripts. So, there’s a few, you know, steps along the way. And we’ll talk about those.

15:09

So, there’s the Integrity Checker, which, you know, really validates the metadata between, you know, what maximal thinks the database should look like, and what the database is actually look like, Or actually is, know, we always recommend running that. And, you know, if you’ve got a fairly substantial size of a database, it’s going to take some time to run that, OK? What does the outage approach look like?

15:33

And cutover plant configuration complexity is another one. If you’ve got a maximal workflow, which, you know, quite often most of our customers do, right, the workflow is really to help facilitate your business process within maximal. You know, you do need to test those. You know, if they’ve got a fairly substantial or if you’ve got a fairly substantial amount of workflow nodes, you know, different use cases that you can basically put the records into workflow. You do need to test those to make sure and validate that they are working correctly.

16:09

The conditional user interface is another one. So this one, you know, if you’ve got applications which conditionally hide show fields or, you know, make a field required during certain conditions.

16:22

You know, you want to make sure that you test all of those training requirements, know, especially, you know, as we move through the versions and we’ll talk about this. The UI have you, user interfaces have changed. So, this, the look and feel of the screens, you, know, even something as simple as colors on the screen has changed even from 76 0 to 761. So your training materials likely would need to be updated to make sure that those are reflected.

16:51

Then lastly, as new functionality, you know, if there’s Deep, do you want it?

16:56

Do you want to take on a like for like technical upgrades? So basically, you know, what you see in the previous version is what you’re going to see in the, you know, the newer version of 761.

17:09

Or, you know, do you have a backlog of enhancements that you want to roll into the upgrade, right? You know, do you want to do process and program improvements as part of an upgrade?

17:21

So that’s really, there’s some considerations that you want to look at as part of upgrading maximums.

17:31

As part of the planning exercise, I’ve got some examples here. You know, you really want to look at your current architecture set up. I guess this is more from a technical perspective, but you want to collect the data and understand your environment. OK, we talked about versioning a little bit, but, you know, each product has its own path. So if you’ve got no oil and gas, as an example installed, you want to look at, OK, well, what’s the current or no oil and gas version? What do we have to move it to? What feature packed do we have to imply? What I fixed, do we have to apply? What’s our final state? OK, so you want to make sure you know what our current version system or versioning is and what’s our to be or target version.

18:19

The environments, so do we know quite often there’s multiple environments. You know, you’ve got your production environment of course, and then you’ve got a number of non production environments. You know, I guess one of the considerations is, do we need new environments? Right? You know how will production sustainment and support happen and be facilitated during the upgrade project? You know, you don’t want to get yourself into a position where, you know, you’re doing a lot of support, of course, right on your production system. But those non production environments are tied up with the upgrade project, right? Because this is gonna really hinder your ability to be able to do production support. Or vice versa is, you know, it’s going to delay the upgrade project So what new environments are needed kin? Some of the existing environments be re-used and then you know, what does that look like for?

19:17

So the overall course of the project itself.

19:22

Looking at your application server. So what exactly application server version do you have? What can we go to? What are the supported application? Server versions? And we’ll talk about, you know, how you can get that information. Actually, I think it’s on the next slide. The server infrastructure architecture. Do you have Windows Server versus Unix Linux? What does that look like? What are the versions? And then same goes with DB two or the database, I should say, so DB two, SQL Server or Oracle.

19:51

You know, quite often what you see as part of these upgrades is, you know, there is kinda like the Coexistence or I guess the the matrix which shows what database is supported. You know, quite often you have to move the database to a new version, right. If you haven’t done so already, you know, you want to make sure that you, you have a support system on all the various components.

20:17

So what else needs upgrading, right? From an integration perspective, this is another one. You look at a new, kind of, compile all the different integrations and look at, OK, what do we need to test? What are the technical considerations for upgrading maximal, know, things like Active Directory? You know, Active Directory has a heavily heavy component of configuring in the application server. So what needs to be redone if you’re moving to a new version of your application server? You know, are you integrated to sabal through something like Azure or the … Protocol through Azure? For example, you know, different integration sold. A couple of examples. Oracle, EBS, sap, or GIS, All of those. And then lastly, I guess, just to kind of understand your environment from a technical perspective is, do you have a middleware tool?

21:11

Like, what does that look like? Who’s going to support that? You know, as part of the upgrade, what if changes are needed to take place as part of the integration? Is there is, are resources available to to make changes in that service bus to be able to process those messages between the two systems?

21:33

Always consult the configuration and Code six coexistence matrix as part of an upgrade. Always recommend that. You know, this is what’s going to tell you what is supported together. What OS is maximal 761? Supported on you know, IBM does release new compatibility with every feature pack, it seems. So, you know, this is kept up to date. You want to make sure if you’re going to 76, 1, 2, you want to make sure the database is the right version if you want to make sure that you’re on the right version of websphere.

22:08

Or web logic. So, you just, I always recommend, make sure you refer to these.

22:19

So, a few more considerations, know, from a server architecture design, you know, as part of an upgrade, you all, you have the ability, And I highly recommend you assess. And you evaluate your current setup. You know, as you have your user accounts changed, in the past few years, right, have they gone up? Do you need to scale up, and then increase the hardware, and increase the number of UI clusters? Or, do you need to scale down right, perhaps, that you don’t have as many users and maximal anymore? So, you don’t need that for user interface cluster anymore. You know, 1 or 2 user interfaces would be fine, which, which ultimately is going to reduce, you know, if you are scaling down, you know, you’re gonna, it’s gonna reduce the cost of those servers, because maybe the memory requirements have gone down as an example.

23:09

Always recommend, you know, Let’s let’s address performance issues, you know, if there’s any performance issues or errors that occur in the log files on a frequent basis, let’s take a look at those, right? No, that’s this upgrade is a good opportunity to start correcting some of those issues or problems that are related to performance. Perhaps you’ve got escalations that are running on the system that are continually airing out. Maybe that’s something that you want to address as part of the, you know, that part of the upgrade, right? You know, the log files and maximal are showing errors every two minutes because of a particular escalation. No, Let’s look at that. Right?

23:53

Then, you know, simplifying. So, maybe there’s something that can be done from an administrative perspective to simplify things, you know, to talk to the administrators, OK? Let’s find out what their challenges are. From an administrative perspective, perhaps, you know, for whatever reason, the services on the administrative server or the application server aren’t working. So when, you know, the services are stopped maximums, not stopping for whatever reason. Alright, And then, lastly, is just a, take the opportunity to, you know, enhance or make changes to the technical landscape, right?

24:28

An upgrade, especially, you know, even as simple as going from 76 0, which argue that it’s not necessarily simple. Going from 7 6 0 to 761, no, typically, new servers are required. New installations are required, not typically they do, you do have to do a new installation of the maximal source code, which, which gives you opportunities to make any changes or optimize something there.

24:57

So that’s from a server architecture perspective, Now, particularly to maximo, it’s always good to take the opportunity as part of an upgrade. To look at your customizations, you know? Is there any ability to pull those Java customizations out, right. Move those Java customizations to us, to automation scripts, automation scripts, you know, over the years. You know, IBM has introduced integration automation scripts, IBM’s introduce now asynchronous automation scripts as a relatively new function. I think that’s 76, 1, 2, you know, there’s lots of opportunity to pull those, don’t pull the Java customizations out, which require no compilation, You need to have a clip CD to deploy them, build them in the ear, fall. You know, everything that’s related to a true Java customizations.

25:52

Pull those out and pull them into automation scripts, which are, you know, much easier to maintain.

25:59

Look at your escalations. Look at your actions, you know, look at your configurations, to see, hey, is there anything that we can really optimize here.

26:13

From a project planning perspective, you know, moving into a new version, you do have to have some level of configuration, freeze, You know, every customer always has enhancements. There’s ongoing changes, We’re making changes, but at some point, there has to be a configuration freeze. So making sure, you know, the business groups and, you know, overall as an organization, understanding, you know, what the project plan looks like.

26:41

When does that … code or configuration freeze need to take place? It has to take place at some point. Because, you know, when you’re upgrading, maximal, you can’t be upgrading maximal with a moving target, right? It’s very difficult. It adds a lot of risk.

26:58

So, some point, before you go live, you have to freeze the configuration is going into production and go through the process of doing the upgrade with that frozen environment, OK. Extensive user testing on the upgraded environment, you know, that’s going to impact the project plan. You want to make sure that you have users available, right.

27:18

You’ll want to make sure that you do go through that acceptance testing, right. And it’s possible, you need multiple sessions for that.

27:28

…, so … are, you know, something that it’s a bug defect or a defect that, you found, you, know, these can add to the timeline, so, you know, I don’t necessarily say, introduce some buffer to, to, to, to allow for that, but, you know, we’ve seen it where you put it BMR in and it does take time because it’s it’s something that needs to be addressed. Right. So you know. Make sure that you know.

27:53

Everyone’s aware that, hey, if we come across a bug, you know, we’ve got two choices, we, we can obviously submit a …, IBM, but maybe we have to work in, you know, we have to fix it right, or make it or create a workaround for that issue.

28:09

Uh, always recommend doing several trial runs, or upgrade runs, I should say, which allows you to work out the timing of bugs. OK, so you always want to make sure you do multiple runs. You don’t want to upgrade a non prod environment, especially, with a more complex system. And then go straight to Prod. You want to make sure that you do at several runs. Especially with integrated environments, you want to make sure you validates tests and then sign off ultimately.

28:39

Cutover planning is very important. You know, you want to make sure that everyone is involved, that understands what the process is. What’s the timeline? Who’s involved with what? Who the responsibilities rely or are on? So, the cutover planning really is important. You know, from the time that, you know, you, you, you basically cut the user’s access off on the older version. So, for example, in 76, 0 8, as an example, there’s going to be a period of time which the the upgrade scripts need to run on that database. Right. So you need to make sure that the cutover, plannings you know, well designed, well, planned out. Everyone understands what needs to be done.

29:21

Training on the new UI, so training is important, as well. You know, the UI has changed, and I’ll show you a few screenshots of what that looks like with 761, and you want to make sure it’s done before go live. This is going to ensure that users have the most success. When you turn the lights on, maximum is up and running on the new version.

29:42

Um, so a couple of things to be aware of, this was this is slightly old news, but I like to just kinda point this out. So, you know, previously, I guess back and, you know, maximal 75, you know, the the frequent fixes that were released by IBM were called fixed packs, OK? You know, they are called now feature packs, OK, I guess, as you probably suspect. And I guess I’ve talked about this on previous Webcasts. A feature pack is really, it’s a combination of bug fixes and product features and enhancements. OK, so right now, maximum of 761 is on its second feature pack, and that is why the versioning is 76.2.

30:23

OK, So the Dart two is really an indication of that. It’s the second feature pack.

30:30

And then also, you don’t want to forget about the eye fixes. So on Fixed Central, which is an IBM website, there’s, you know, IBM does do, typically, monthly releases of eye fixes, which is basically a monthly package of any bug, your, or bug fixes, or defect fixes that’s rolled into that.

30:52

So you want to make sure you account for those as well, just because, you know, there could be a period of time that feature packs not out, right? So that you could go through six months or a half a year, or potentially sometimes longer waiting.

31:09

You know, you, you don’t have the most up to date.

31:14

Fixes from IBM.

31:18

So, moving to 761, let’s talk about what is supported in the process. So, this one’s probably pretty obvious, but the DD support it, right? You should have no loss of data, by no means, right, So, that the tools, there’s a couple of tools that are involved with the upgrade process.

31:37

You know, typically, it’s the Integrity Checker, which really is, you know, checks a variety of different things, which we’ll talk about here in a bit. And then, the update DD portion of the upgrade, but all of the data is upgraded as part of this configurations that were performed within the maximal configuration tools. So, anything that was done within the UI, you know, anything that’s done within that, you know, the system configuration, the platform configuration module. And then you got a number of different applications that are there, You, know, anytime that, you do make changes to those, that, the upgrade does, you know, really upgrade those to the new version, OK, Once in a while, you will find that, things don’t work correctly based on a variety of different changes, potentially. And that’s really where the testing comes into play.

32:29

Data model. So the Data model is really our database configuration. So a Data model is the metadata of maximo. So it’s what maximal believes the database should be.

32:41

Um, the user interface and presentation layer, those do get upgraded. Now, with changes of the UI. You know, this is a big one.

32:51

Because you really want to validate, to make sure the screens look the way that you want them to. There’s been some changes to the user interface, which could impact and introduce some issues with the way that the screens are, the layout, and, you know, the look and feel of the streets.

33:08

So testing, once again, is very important there.

33:11

Workflow processes. So this is the workflow processes that have been built using the workflow designer. Those do get upgraded data. Validations default values that are typically associated in database configuration get, upgraded. And then, lastly is integration definitions.

33:30

Couple of things that are not supported as part of upgrading to 76, 1, 2, or 76, 1, you know, Java customizations, those need to be addressed, you know? Even something as simple as moving from 76 0 to 761, The g.d.k. has changed, right? So, maximal uses a different g.d.k. now. So, you know, it took to correctly, move those over from one version to another. You do need to recompile right. So you do need the source code. You do need to recompile those Java customizations and I guess that would be, that’s really one of the good reasons why if you’re having to readdress the Java Customization by re compiling it.

34:12

You might want to consider moving those to automation scripts anyway.

34:17

Any changes to the database schema, or objects that were not done with the database configuration. So if you’ve done direct table alter statements in the database, which is, you know, adding attributes, adding columns, making changes directly in the database, those no maximum ultimately is not aware of those. Sure, they’re in the database, and, you know, when you do a backup restore, those, do move around with the database. But I guess you could have some, you know, unresolved or unknown issues if you’ve made some changes directly on the database. So, you know, I guess, just, I guess, technically, I guess it’s not really supported automatically or at all by the upgrade process. So those would need to be manually addressed. This is similar to, you know, the first bullet points or any changes to source files.

35:05

So, really, anything that you’ve changed within the maximal, IBM S&P directory.

35:11

So if you’ve done things and you know, XML files within their javascript’s, the GSP files.

35:18

None of those, yes, do come over automatically.

35:23

And I guess the reason for that is maximal 761 needs to do install. So if you’re going from 7 6 0 to 7 6 1, you do have to re-install maximal, So the IBM S&P folder needs to be re-installed. And of course, it’s not like you’re going to be able to, you know, move what’s been changed in the 7 6 0 SMP folder into the 761 S&P folder without some manual intervention there.

35:53

So, a typical upgrade process, these are pretty high level kind of phases. You know, but, you know, it’s pretty common for every upgrade to kind of go through these, these common phases. Now, each one of these phases, you know, especially when you get down to the development and the test phases, there may be multiple iterations. So, you may do multiple migrations as an example. You may do multiple testing sessions, OK, As an example, but these are fairly typical upgrade process phases, OK? So, moving from all the way from the requirements and design. So this is quite often as, you know, if you’re making major changes, or any changes as part of the upgrade really fully understanding what that looks like, and how do you configure that, OK, the development aspect.

36:44

So really, you know, running the upgrade itself, upgrading maximum to the new version. You know, is there any development or configurations that need to be done?

36:56

Testing? So going through different testing C phases. Perhaps you, you want to do multiple UET sessions, or, you know, a specific integration testing phase, right?

37:07

So integrated testing, so those are all slightly, that makes project plan or a project slightly different. others, you know, every project has its slight nuances. So a couple, couple things I want to point out here is, you know, with every upgrade or on, you know, you want to restore the database from production on each run. A couple of reasons for this is, you know, production changes and evolves, and especially if you’ve got, you know, a sustainment or an enhancement process, which, you know, production is evolving and changing and configurations are being put into production.

37:43

You know, that, you want to make sure you have a live, know, snapshot of that, to run the upgrade tools on. So. And then also data, right? So the data changes, you know, once in a while, they eat, it, does introduce errors as into the upgrade process, and you want to make sure that you do cover those. If there is data changes that are going to cause problems, you don’t want to run into that, you know, post go live in production, right?

38:11

Run the Integrity Checker, so there’s an Integrity Checker tool. What this does is this compares the metadata to maximal and I briefly talked about this earlier, to what’s in the database. It makes a comparison. It recommend some changes. Always take a peek at that.

38:27

This is gonna give you a little bit of a health check on, you know, is there a major gap between or differences between the metadata, which is, you know, a variety of different database tables in maximo. So, things like max, attribute, or max. Object. So those are two tables, which store the metadata. It’s going to report back, saying, Hey, are the metadata of maximal Has some conflicting information in it compared to what’s actually in the database?

38:57

And we’d like to, obviously, you know, you correct those as part of an upgrade testing phase. So, updating and validating test cases is important. You know that the test cases may slightly change, especially if you’re doing enhances enhancements as part of an upgrade. We want to focus on that, right. And then, lastly, is that, you know, the Deployment Plan, this is a really important step of it. It should be a guide on who’s doing what, when, when it’s happening, and what are the expectations of what’s going on, right? You want to have a very solid cutover plan.

39:39

So a couple, a couple of, couple of things. You know, just the typical upgrade rules, we’ll talk about not, gonna get into it too much, but, you know, you really want to separate out the rules as part of this.

39:51

You know, quite often, they’re somewhat no functional in respect of what the resource is focusing on. So, you know, you definitely want to have kind of a solution architect on an upgrade project. That person’s really just going to provide the vision and the guidance of the overall project. If there’s an issue, you know, they can, you know, ultimately escalate it, you know, to whether that’s a steering committee or whatnot of the upgrade. So, this person’s really responsible for from, that for the upgrade.

40:27

From a project perspective, typically, you would have a couple of technical folks on the team, You know, one person potentially focusing on the installation and upgrade, another person, maybe focusing specifically on the integrations, if there is any.

40:43

You know, another person that’s focused on the functional aspect of it, so, testing, you know, some of the change management aspects. Training, materials, training preparation, ensuring the use case, and the test cases are up to date.

40:59

And then, lastly, know, a kind of a business continuity person. So, someone, you know, this one, is sometimes overlooked. It’s, it’s somebody who’s going to be able to bridge the gap between the different teams. Because if you’re if you have a large or large maximal deployment and you’re integrated to multiple applications, you know, the teams need to be able to communicate with, between one another. And, you know, I guess, quite often, this may be the project manager. And, of course, I don’t have a project manager on here, there’s a lot of different roles that aren’t on here, but, you know, I guess I wanted to kind of show you, here, come, some of the standard or typical upgrade roles that we’ve seen.

41:44

OK, so let’s talk, let’s talk about the release itself. So, 76 want to release the big one is the modernized user interface so that the skin has ultimately changed, so the look and feel is different. You know spacing has different or it has changed, the response, a little bit of a responsiveness has changed. So, as part of an upgrade, you want to make sure your screens look fine, right? You know, test on a screen size that the end users are using. Right? You don’t want to, you know, test on your, you know, your, your 27 inch monitor in your office, and, you know, in the Operations office, maybe there’s a different size, right? You want to make sure that you’re testing on the, kind of the similar sized screen, right? So you know what it looks like. So there’s dynamic positioning of labels. So you can, you know, move the labels, have it, you know, either on the horizontal or vertical. So, that’s something that’s relatively new.

42:43

I mentioned the look and feel, You know, some of the icons have changed. So there is new icons and images. Maxwell 761 has work centers, of course, So this isn’t necessarily a new thing. Oh, excuse me. Work centers was released in 76 0, but there’s, you know, there is a new work center in 76 1, there is an inventory work center that has been released, and then ongoing changes to work centers and enhancements continually to be ruled out.

43:13

I’m not going to focus too much. Probably spend a lot of time on work centers, but that won’t be the focus of this session.

43:23

Just to kind of talk through, you know, there’s, there’s some functionality enhancements. Some of these enhancements were in 7 6 0, but I wanted to repeat some of these, I guess, the, the one that’s more particular for 761, there is no included it? with some of the UI changes, the drill down is a, it’s the drill down, has been enhanced, and updated, but I do want to note that that has to be enabled through a maximal dot property.

43:52

OK, so, Asset Depreciation is in core maximal, there’s a License usage monitor, Budget tracking, Material Reservation Types. Those have all been included.

44:04

No, those are more for 76 year old, though.

44:09

Some technology enhancements. one of the nice thing is the browsers don’t need applets anymore.

44:15

So there’s no javid dependency from an end user perspective for maximal 761 2.

44:24

There is new, I guess, new server requirements, supported middleware and database. So I talked about this a little bit with the, the matrix that you can reference. But Windows Server 2019 is now supported as of 7, 6, 1, 2. You know, different databases so DB two versioning, Oracle and SQL server. Of course, bug and security fixes, that’s with every release.

44:51

There’s always, you know, if a PO mar’s determined or are deemed to be a true bug, that will be rolled into an I fix. That I fix typically gets released monthly, approximately.

45:06

And then that I fix, basically all of the I fixes get rolled into a feature pack.

45:15

Scripting enhancements, so I talked about this earlier. So automation scripts can now do asynchronous job scheduling.

45:22

So, that was as, that was in 76, 1.

45:28

Few images, so if you’re used to 75 or even 7 6 0. This does look a little bit different. I’ve got the login screen here, so it’s kind of a blue theme. The navigation bars, the image on the bottom. So, you’ll notice there is definitely some icons and subtle changes. Of course, with the new version. You’ll see the the goto menu is the three lines on the left-hand side, and that’s going to bring our goto menu down.

45:56

OK, couple images of the Start Center, I do.

46:01

I’ve, I’ve put just an older, maximum, 75 start centers image on the screen there as well.

46:08

Just to kinda show some comparisons, You know, left-hand navigation was introduced quite some time ago with the kind of the goto menu on the left-hand side of the screen, as well as the select auction. But that’s not necessarily new.

46:26

Just a few icon changes.

46:29

This one is referencing to 75. Even 76 Zeros is going to be different as well. So that’s, but, you know, the the icons for Start Center goto Menu Bulletin Board, Reports Profile, sign out, and they all have slightly changed.

46:48

A few more images, just to give you an idea of what this looks like, you know, there you can do vertical labels and fields. Some of the images, like I had mentioned, have changed, and then the sidebar navigation. So that’s gonna be a big one. If you’re familiar or used to 75, you’ve got your your side side navigation, which is shown on a couple of these screens.

47:15

Years were Quartered Trucking Standard screenshot here, just showing where quarter tracking with the, you know, this, This screenshot is just an out of the box default Demo obese, Demo Database screenshot.

47:33

So, just briefly to touch base on the work centers, in case you’re not super familiar with them, you know, they are specialized applications, You know, they’re set up for many different device types, so, they focus, you, know, of the work centers is for, I guess, you know, an iPad or phone. So, more from a mobility perspective, they are online only, So, right now, currently there is no offline capabilities of these. These were introduced in 76 0, and either they were enhanced as part of the 76 1 release, as well as additional work centers were came out.

48:15

So, for example, the inventory work Center was released in 761, They do use a role based approach. So, so any other work centers is typically some level of a role for, for example, you know, a work supervision role or a work execution role.

48:34

There is no licensing, or, should I say, there’s no additional licensing required. Assuming you do have the appropriate entitlement and permissions in maximo, You have the appropriate permissions to do, or to access the similar data on the work center itself.

48:56

Alright, just to kind of wrap things up before we jump into the Q&A session, I just, you know, a couple of keys to a successful upgrades. You know, analyze your requirements, really understand what the goal of the upgrade is. Are you doing a like for like, upgrades? are you actually are you making changes, right? Is there enhancements, you know? Make sure you really fully understand what the business requirements are, what is changing, you know, and then ensure that, you know, those are well documented, right? You know, is there any new functionality in the upgrade?

49:33

So, we talked about some of the new stuff, or the new functionality that was released in 76, 1, and even seven, some of the leader versions in 76 0. You know, if you’re moving from 75 or 76 0, is there any new functionality that you want to implement? Is there something from a business? You know, do you have a business need? Or a challenge that’s going to be solved by introducing some of this new functionality.

49:59

Really plan and understand the path and approach, Right? So, you know, the, you need to know exactly what version changes, what, it’s gonna look like, what servers are needed, you know? what’s the infrastructure needs, you know, what does that approach for that, right?

50:16

This is kind of a new term for this session but do a trial upgrades. Trial upgrade is really just, you know, get going on an initial upgrade in a non production environment and see what no errors you have. What are that’s going to be some of the challenges, you know, making sure that you understand what the scope of work is from a technical perspective. You know.

50:39

Perhaps you’ve got 50 Java customizations and, you know, this is going vastly change what the project plan looks like for the, for an upgrade project.

50:50

Don’t underestimate the number of testing or the amount of testing. Make sure you’re doing a significant amount of testing. You know, it’s going to really depend on your environment. You know, we talked about a lot of the things that do have an impact on the testing integrations is a big one, Right? Configurations can be a big one. If you’ve got a substantial amount of existing automation scripts from your 76, 0 environment, you want to go through and validate every single one of those automation scripts, while automation scripts do upgrade.

51:25

I guess there’s no guarantee that the code is going to run correctly. It is code, it’s scripts. You can also call Java methods and, you know, do some very sophisticated stuff with automation scripts. So, while you’re going to see that automation script definition in the code in 761, it may not work, right? So, you want to make sure you do test it.

51:48

Perform multiple upgrade runs, right. It’s not, you know, if you’ve got a complicated and complex environment, it typically isn’t just upgrade dev and moved to prod, right? You’re gonna need to do multiple upgrade runs. You know, lot of large implementations have 5, 6, 7 environments, right, and you’re gonna need to do multiple runs. It’s, you know, you do your development, and, you know, you fix errors from a unit test perspective, And then, you move on to the test environment, and you go through that process again. And then, if everyone you know the unit testing is successful, everything looks good. Perhaps, then you move into a user acceptance testing, or, you know, a mini testing session of some sort, so you know that the number of upgrade runs is really going to be dependent on the complexity of the environment.

52:40

What is the training and change management strategy? Do you have, you know, lots of user training guides that have potentially old screenshots, Right? The screenshots and the UI has changed, perhaps, you know, you’ve made some changes to the screens, right? Even with the upgrade So, you know, you, you definitely want to make sure that, those are update up to date, Right? Previously talked about this, which is very important is the Production Deployment plan or playbook. What exactly is the step by step process for this? And then, lastly, I guess, you know, if you need help engage an expert, right? This is, you know, this isn’t something, you know, an upgrade doesn’t happen on a monthly basis. This is one thing, one time that happens, You know, I guess going from 71 to 75, you upgrade once 75 to 76 year old.

53:33

You potentially upgrade one once, and then 76 0 to 761 You upgrade once again, And that’s, you know, over the course of 12 to 14, 15 years, right? So, you know, if you need help engage an expert, who’s done this? Lots, Right?

53:51

All right, we’ve got about seven minutes.

53:55

I’m sure there’s probably lots of questions.

53:58

Really hope everyone found some of that information valuable.

54:03

I’ll, I’ll stick around here and I think we’ll probably cats going to moderate some of the questions and ask the questions and, you know, hopefully I can answer some of them, but we don’t, we don’t have a ton of time, but let’s why don’t we get into some of the questions if anyone has any, I guess you bet, Jeff. And just to let folks know, we will be sending out a copy of the PowerPoint afterwards with a link to this video. If you do have a question, please type it into the question box. If we aren’t able to answer them all, we will chat out to you later.

54:37

And we do have more questions than we have time for, so I’m going to have to just pick and choose here.

54:44

Automation scripts from 7 dot 6 dot 0 dot 8, I compatible with 7 dot 6 dot 1 2.

54:54

So, yeah, it’s a great question. Really good, so.

54:58

So the automation script application in 760-2761 is the same. So it’s the automation script. You’ve got the definition of the script itself. You’ve got the launch points. So, when you upgrade from 760827612 as an example, the automation script is going to be there. It’s going to be there At the definition is going to be there, your code is going to be there. You know, everything theoretically should work. OK, now there is you know, with with code changes to maximo, you know, sometimes IBM does deprecate methods or Java methods. So if you’re using some of those Java methods, they may not necessarily work anymore if you’ve got simple scripts. The likelihood of them working is pretty high. If you’ve got it overly complicated and complex scripts, you know, there’s a chance that they don’t work, right, but at the very least, the script itself moves from one version to another.

56:01

Um, I guess I, once again, I just recommend, you know, compile the list of the automation scripts that you have, right, look through them.

56:10

If you’ve got 200 automation scripts, maybe kind of kind of categorize them into high, medium, low, right from a complexity perspective, right?

56:20

And, you know, then you’re gonna understand, OK, well, no, we feel that the low ones should work, The high ones are going to need some special attention, right, To validate exactly what the logic is going through that, right, so.

56:36

It’s, it’s kind of a yes or no answer. I suppose, and, I hope that helps you. Know, once again, feel free. You know, I’m always welcome to e-mails.

56:45

If you have a specific question, but it should, it will upgrade.

56:51

But it depends on the code. I guess that’s the answer. OK, We’ve got, like I said, we have more questions and we’re going to be able to answer in this time. I apologize, We will get those answered directly to you.

57:06

I heard that new servers will be required was 7 dot 6 dot 1 dot 2, is that correct?

57:14

It is.

57:14

So I guess It can. It depends.

57:18

So if you’re on, for example, 76 0, on Windows Server 2008, or two, you want to make sure you look at the compatibility matrix and see how likely you will see the compatibility matrix.

57:32

And you’ll see, oh, Windows Server 2008 R 2 is not supported on 76, 1. 2. So that I guess that is the reason why I I briefly mentioned that new servers maybe required. I maybe missed me part of that. But you’ll you’ll want to look at the recommended the compatibility matrix. So depending on which administrative or Windows server you’re on, or I guess any server, whether it’s Linux or Unix, you want to make sure that, you know, the the to be state is supported.

58:07

But that said, when you do move to 761, you do have to re-install maximo, so whatever wherever that goes maximal does need to be installed or re-installed because the source code is a different stream.

58:22

So it is a re-install. So it’s a new S&P folder. It’s a new IBM S&P folder, I should say.

58:28

And I hope that helps, I’d be more than happy to jump on a call if you had questions about the Coexistence or the compatibility matrix or what that looks like.

58:38

Um, 1 one more I think we have time for We are using guests’ login using the guess login, JP TSP for 7 dot 6 dot 0 dot 8.

58:51

Will the same file be compatible was 76 1 2 that the guest’s login.

59:00

So the guest login is very specific to your environment. So that would be that’s, you know, maybe this is probably a good question to shoot me an e-mail.

59:10

But my guess, my guess is, I guess, login is just simply a user account in maximal in your current maximal environment.

59:19

And you’re going to use it in the new environment. I’m guessing.

59:26

Let’s take that one offline. No. I will answer that one offline, and unfortunately, I think that’s actually going to wrap it up for today. We do have several more questions that are in the queue. We will answer those Will get this, Jeff, and he will send those out to you as well as the other members of our team. do want to thank you for joining us for lunch today. I want to thank everyone who has attended we will make this recording available for anyone who would like to take home leftovers. We will be taking next week off. And wish her a happy Thanksgiving to our US attendees. We will see everyone in December.

1:00:04

Thank you everyone.