Anyone Upgrade ERP8 to 8.10 on iSeries (AS/400) share experience

We have what I think is a relatively small JDE ERP8 installation for one of our business units. We are wanting to upgrade to 8.10. Most of the company runs on "other" software on the same iSeries 820 and I think we have a strong IT department. I'm looking for anyone that has (or is in the process) upgraded from ERP8 to 8.10 on iSeries without outside assistance that would share their experiences.

How long did the various steps take?
How good is the JDE/Peoplesoft docs?
What problems did you run into?

Any and all recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I have done this three times, each with different degrees of frustration. First and foremost. If you're setup is or ever was Coexistance, be sure you go through the Ending Co-existance procedures. You're table conversions will fail otherwise.

I found the documentation to be pretty good, but only if you do it to the letter. I did not any of my cases. Each customer had something a little quirky about their upgrades, like one wanted to use a different deployment server, one wanted multiple DD's and security tables, etc.

Do NOT, repeat, DO NOT try to do this upgrade using remote control software. No VNC, no terminal services, no PC Anywhere....all will cause memory errors. Go directly to the servers. If they are half way around the world, enjoy your plane ride there.

Lastly, remember to set your spec merge flags. If you want to retain Vocab Overrides, you need to set your spec merges on those apps. There is a disadvantage to doing that though (see threads about this).

Lastly BE SURE you are on the lastest requirements spelled out in the APAR listing.

Good Luck.

Thanks for the reply. Two clarifications please.

[ QUOTE ]
…setup is or ever was Coexistance..."

[/ QUOTE ]Do you mean World/E1 coexistence?


[ QUOTE ]

Lastly, remember to set your spec merge flags. If you want to retain Vocab Overrides, you need to set your spec merges on those apps. There is a disadvantage to doing that though (see threads about this).


[/ QUOTE ] I've read a couple dozen threads about Vocab Overrides and/or spec merges and I can't seem to find anything related to disadvantage after an upgrade. Could you please get me a little closer?

Jerry

Jerry, I just converted our company from 8.0 to 8.10 in Feb/Mar. It was definitely a trying time with things not working exactly as described "by the book". Unlike Fred's experience, I did everything using remote software (DameWare) without any problems in that regard.

I first made a dry run in a sandbox (separate partition) on the iSeries in order to understand the process. This required that I set up a new deployment server and JAS server which increased my depth of understanding the upgrade process. One of the biggest headaches was the installation workbench. Some of the TCs failed because of the 8.93.M1 Tools Release that I was also applying. Seems that Tools Release had some bugs that ended up as major bugs if you were also doing an upgrade. However, PeopleSoft emailed me the correct DLLs to continue the process.

My second mistake was then applying Tools Release 8.94.D1 to remedy the installation problems. I didn't realize that I'd also have to upgrade my WebSphere 4 to WebSphere 5 if using 8.94.xx. I then had revert back to Tools Release 8.93.M1 (that was fun!). After all was said and done, I was ready for the live partition.

I then refreshed my PY environment to make it match PD and started the upgrade process for PY per the manual (albeit slightly modified since we decided to no longer use DV for development - but rather for training using demo data). The PY upgrade from 8.0 to 8.10 took the whole weekend and the Friday before. By Monday we were up and running with full clients for PY and web clients using JAS servers. This process allowed me to validate my estimated times.

The largest surprise was how long it took us to stablilize the ERP 8.10 PY environment with ESUs for payroll, etc. before we were ready to copy it to PD. We went through much more testing than was originally planned before we finally were satisfied with PY.

A month later, we then copied PY objects, etc. to PD and converted the ERP 8.0 PD data to ERP 8.10. We opted not to use UNICODE for our data conversion. The PD update process all occurred within one weekend.

The largest headache after that was an instability in the system caused by JOBQs that were left from 8.0 (specifically the QB7334 JOBQ). This little problem caused our system to error out on all UBEs submitted regardless of JOBQs. It took PeopleSoft and us about 1 week to identify this problem. After that, things were good.

I've included my ERP 8.10 Upgrade spreadsheet for your review so that you can see the process I used and the approximate runtimes involved. Enjoy and good luck!