Hello BPC for Microsoft World! As a newbie to blogging, my goal is to assist and pass along my educational learning points to all who enter the world of BPC migrations and upgrades. I have worked with BPC for 6 years now and while I may have a history and skills with the toolset, I still have a lot to learn. Hopefully, what I learn I may pass on to all of you, so when you see the same issue or complex challenge, you will say,"Hey, wait a minute, I have a feeling I have seen this before somewhere?" Just like I do, when I see common recurring themes related to BPC.
So what to start with? Well, first I want to say that we should all begin to PLAN and challenge our existing BPC customers to either MIGRATE or UPGRADE to the soon to be released version of BPC, 7.0 SP3. A new frontier for BPC; More improvements than I can list and capable of sitting on Microsoft SQL2008 and SQL2005. More importantly, BPC versions of 4.X and 5.X will have an end of maintenance support life in April 2010. And since MOST business cycles start planning and budgeting in a few months, we have a lot of work ahead.
Seriously, the companies on version 4.x and version 5.x must begin to plan and process the need for a new environment. I like to break these groups into the 2 distinct processes; Version 4.X will be MIGRATING and Version 5.X will be UPGRADING. Those on version 5.x may have already migrated from 4 at an earlier point in time, but now they should leap again to a new, better, faster verion. Those in version 4 must leap.....just leap. In support of the leap, we will have a MIGRATION UTILITY available to support your process. It will perform about 80% of the work with some manual work involved in the other 20% of the process. However, you must plan accordingly for this process, since 80% of the value in the migration is generally performed in the 20% of the manual process. As I said, I hope to share the experiences of migrations with you all, as I work though more of them.
Now you are all wondering "When can I have the tool?" I must admit, I don't know either exactly, but will share the details once they are ready. What I can say is that I have used the Migration tool on about 8 migrations and it has saved much additional work. The wore effort I put into preparing the existing verion 4 for the migration, the smotther the process followed. So, for now, begin your planning and focus on developing a timetable, transition plan, and changemanagement strategy for a version 4 MIGRATION. For those on verion 5.....your lucky. Once you have the new version 7 install complete, and make a few minor adjustments to your existing application set, you should be ready to transition.
But I will address both of these later, for now, start the planning process and get prepared for a fantastic new product.
Petar
