Change Management?

[cwarner]

We have three instances of OTM running, Development, Training, and Production. We are starting to find it difficult to keep all of our instances the same as we implement enhancements and additional features for users, Managing Screen Sets, removing unnecessary fields, adding agents, etc. We can clone our production environment down, but that only will carry over changes made in the database, and when we are trying to move changes up, it is a manual process each time as we obviously don't want to overwrite our production data. How do you guys keep your instances the same? Are we missing something, or is this just very difficult?

Adding to our problems is the fact that our development environment was upgraded to 5.5 CU3 so that we could test the patch, while our other environments are 5.5. CU2.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[bob_romijn]

Re: Change Management?

Hi,

I have exactly the same problem. I "solved" it with good documentation that keeps track of hat has gone from development to Production. Problem is that it takes a lot of time.

THat was in Version 5.0 because we are still running that.

In version 5.5 it is worth looking at the "move to production" functionality for this. It isi possible to keep track of what you changed and move that to a prodcution machine.
It is even possible to move transactional data from a production environment to a development system! And all this through the front end.

Oracle also realised it is a major problem, so they did something for this moving issue. If it fits your needs, I don't know.

Best regards,

Bob.

[cwarner]

Promote to Production

It looks like it is actually called "Promote to Production" and this is what the help file has in it.

"Promote to Production - This enhancement adds flexibility to the CSV export process. You can move configuration data, such as agents, business monitors, external systems and saved queries, from a test environment into a production environment. You can also clean out a test environment by exporting the operational data such as orders, releases and shipments. You can select which data gets copied from Finder pages throughout OTM. You can then push the selected data into production. You may have added several itineraries, some you want to copy to production and others that you do not."

Does anyone have any experience with this? I guess we talked to our Hitachi consultants about this while we were setting up the system and they said that this process misses some of the pieces specifically in the Agent export process.

[bob_romijn]

Re: Change Management?

Hi,

The experience I have with it is that it indeed creates CSVs which you can upload yourself to the production system or via the backdoor (OTM posts the CSVs to the prod).

I didn't try it with agents.
I have only experience with moving agents to prod using CSVs and I tell you.... It won't work always. So if this new feature also uses CSVs for that, which it does, it won't work always.
The problem is for the lines of an agent that contains quotes (") and commas. In direct sql lines you will use commas, so they are not always moved in quite well....

My suggestion to agents is move them manually to be sure.

Best regards,

Bob

[chrisplough]

Re: Change Management?

I'm also very interested in this functionality and believe it has great potential.

The last time I tried it was back with OTM CU2 and we weren't able to get it working reliably. Now that OTM v5.5 CU3 RU3 is out, I wonder if it's any better. I'd love to test, but we have a few projects on our plate right now

Has anyone else had a chance to test?

--Chris

[bob_romijn]

Re: Change Management?

Hi Chris,

I tested it also in 5.5 CU2 and it worked fine. Only with the remarks made above for the direct sql statement etc. At the background it is CSV as far as I can see and CSV uploads never worked very reliable when characters as '," etc are used.
I think you will keep the same problems if they are still using CSV.

Best regards,

Bob

[cwarner]

Re: Change Management?

I would expect us to test this in CU3 RU2 once we get our environments back in sync. Right now dev is CU3, and Test and Prod are CU2. We have gotten pulled a lot of different ways since putting CU3 in dev and haven't finished our testing to get it moved up yet.

[chrisplough]

Re: Change Management?

Just a heads-up that CU3 RU3 has already hit the press. Just installed it at a client without issue.

--Chris

[cwarner]

Re: Change Management?

Yeah, I know RU3 is out, but we started testing on RU2 and it doesn't make much sense to install RU3 and start over.