About 6 weeks ago we went live with an upgrade from 4.7 to ERP6. In the weeks afterwards, and still now, we had users calling our helpdesk saying "the system is doing this now - before the upgrade it used to do it differently", or "the upgrade has broken this". Sometimes this was true, often, though, the user is finding some behaviour they think is odd and attributing it to the upgrade when it has been like that all along. Just today I have been investigating an apparently upgrade-related issue that, it turns out, has nothing at all to do with the upgrade. How can I be sure? Because I kept a copy of our production system as it was pre-upgrade, so I could check! It turns out that the behaviour in question has been that way for the last 12 years, but the user was convinced it was broken by the upgrade!
This happened with our last upgrade also, and we kept that pre-upgrade copy for just over 12 months to make sure we'd been through a complete financial year and run even those activities that happen only once a year. We'll do the same with the copy this time too.
In these days of virtual servers and storage, keeping a system copy around is pretty simple and costs very little, but it can save a great deal of time and energy. If you are in the middle of an upgrade now and don't have this in your plan, add it.
