Finally the time has come and the client is upgrading with our help. The main reason for an upgrade is the belief that performance and stability of the new version is better than the current EP5 SP4 version they are running. In this blog I will tell you about the process we are going through from planning to realisation and go live (successful I hope).
Our workload has been very high in recent months creating new functionality for the client, small improvements, bug fixes and large projects have been taking up 150% of our time. The first thing we are looking for content wise is will our developments run smoothly on a new portal version. We have developed using Java, JSP Dynpages fetching and creating content from SAP R3 through RFC´s and BAPI´s. Thousands of hours have been invested in those programs, equal number of ABAP development and Java hours. We would love to rewrite some of these programs, especially the early ones since they were created while the knowledge in using these technologies was low and the code is poor. If there are some quick wins in there we will find them, recommend them to the customer and hopefully get them approved.
We have been having a number of problems in the past. Reverse proxy server doesn´t support the portal correctly, ldap has acted in a funny way dropping users from groups and deleting users, performance has been poor, timeouts inconsistent, portal is unstable and goes down too often, our coding isn´t stored in a proper way=no code repository, our access to the production system hasn´t been good since the network and security people don´t like to open up all the ports needed. All these problems we are looking to fix with a clean EP6 installation. The next weeks will be spent reading up on the options available and sharing the answers we find with you all.
