Strategy for migrating e9 customizations to e10

We’re migrating customizations into E10 vanilla as part of our upgrade process via the Solution Manager. I’ve done some proof of concept testing to verify I know how to migrate BAQs and Dashboards as well as delete them. We’ve reviewed the ERP Analyzer spreadsheet specifically for dashboards. Our plan is for every dashboard we want to keep migrate the corresponding BAQs, and for any that didn’t uplift fix and test before migration. Once Dashboards and corresponding BAQs are migrated we’ll start working through bpms, etc until we work our way through all customizations in the ERP Analyzer spreadsheet. We’re thinking of saving the CAB files on a network drive with a date as part of the filename so if we need to update anything we can create a new CAB file with an updated date and archive the old CAB file. Never having done this before I’m not sure if there are benefits to putting all BAQs in a CAB file and Dashboards in another or if having a single “master” CAB file is easiest. Are there any recommendations / strategies for migrating customizations? Does our plan sound reasonable.

After the customizations are migrated we’ll start bringing in end users for testing / training in E10 looking for issues for the next month or so until we feel confident we’re ready for the 2nd DB conversion. We’d love to hear any feedback.

Hi Eddie,
there is a very important issue you never mentioned, may be you have catered for it already, but it is worth mentioning, UD fields and Tables, the structure of E10 especially with regard to UD filed is different, once you create a UD filed for any table Epicor 10 will create hidden UD table and link it to the original table by sysrow and foreign sys row, so you need to identify/map out all of your existed E9 UD fields and make sure that will move to E10 when migrate your data,

with regarding to your data migration strategy, i personally prefer to put every thing in one master file, and separate the items in different tabs (sheets) if you are using Excel, finally when migrating data you need to consider every thing not only Dashboards/BAQ’s/BPM’s and UI Customization,
i.e ( UD fields, used UD Tables, User Codes, BPM Data Form Designer, UD/Dashboards Menus, Process Calls, System Agent Tasks, and your Reports at least the main used ones)
i would advice you to put every subject of these in separate sheet, identify yours, check the status in e9, then move to e10, test and validate, resolve any issues at this stage, and record all that as part of your testing plan before inviting users to test any thing.

I recommend the following:

Migrate from E9 to E10_Development, then do your Uplifting/Tweaks in E10_Development and create .cab files out of there for the future E10 Environment

  1. Copy E9 Production to E9 Pilot and don’t let anyone touch Pilot, you can compare data etc
  2. Epicor will Uplift 90% of the code for you once you are done migrating, running conversion workbench, verifying customizations (yes it will replace Epicor.* namespaces with Erp.* and Ice.*)
  3. It will for the most part already convert all your BAQs. However you should go through each one and validate it still works. If not make tweaks.
  4. It will convert your Auto-Print rules, Changelogs etc… BPMs
  5. BPMs - The ones with custom code, won’t be uplifted automatically. Use the ABL Converter and get a ballpark idea of the code and then using pieces re-do all your BPMs from scratch.
  6. Dashboards will uplift too 99% of cases, go through each one and re-deploy each one.
  7. UD Columns will migrate usually just fine, Migration Admin Console will give you a log what failed and what was truncated, so you might need to migrate 5x before you get it right.
  8. Go through every Customization and make sure there is nothing new overlapping your UI Components, if there is, you have to move things around.
  9. Check all your RDDs / Styles (Styles always came over just fine)
  10. Move you Crystal Reports to the reports folder on IIS Web App
  11. Use Attachments Maintenance and modify your Attachment Paths so you are not affecting productions attachments (It comes with a find/replace utility) and yes also move your attachments to new folder.

The name of the game should be AS-IS Uplift, do not go tweaking stuff unecessarily or refactoring just yet! Get the exact same behaviour in E10_Development as you have in E9, work backwards; let Epicor do 90% of the work for you,youd be surprised how close it gets uplifting it all.

Now you create Solutions out of E10_Development for E10_UserTesting.


I like to keep a local Uplift folder with everything extracted. E9 and E10 then I can always use it for reference and use WinMerge to compare.

2018-11-07_0737
2018-11-07_0735


PS: I’ve done the migration process over 50 times and I have it pretty much down to a technique, also, have a Customization freeze in E9 - no new features until E10. =)

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I’m in the process of migrating dashboards and found the solution manager is smart enough to identify what BAQs are needed and prompts me to append those to the solution(nice feature). Anyway, in installing the solution I’ve found some of our dashboards were using “pre-canned” BAQs from Epicor, and when I install those BAQs I getting prompted as the BAQ already exists in E10. For now I’m leaving what comes with E10 by default / I’m not overwriting the pre-canned BAQs from Epicor. Assuming we haven’t changed the pre-canned BAQs from Epicor would there be any reason to migrate them from E9 to E10?

@embedded also check this post: