Planning the Upgrade

You need to plan your upgrade so that you know what to expect at each stage of the process.

In the planning stage, you can review the upgrade documentation for information about the

  • expected behavior
  • new features
  • deprecated features
  • compatibility between versions
  • requirements for preparing your production environment

When you finish the review, you can then conduct a site survey to identify the infrastructure, applications, and custom configuration settings. Finally, you can test the upgrade on a subset of your data to fine tune your plans, applications, and data before committing to the full upgrade.

The following diagram shows a high level view of the phases in an upgrade project.

Figure 1. Overview of the IBM Cognos Planning upgrade process
An upgrade diagram that shows a high level view of the phases in an upgrade project.

When planning your upgrade, ensure that you

  • gather the necessary information, such as the required inputs and expected outputs for each phase
  • assess the applications in your environment
  • install the new software in a test environment and deploy the content to the test environment
  • test the upgraded applications

Deployment and testing is usually an iterative process. Assess any differences between the source and target environments to determine actionable activities. Move to your production environment when you are satisfied that the deployed applications meet your business requirements.

Do not change security providers, such as changing from a Cognos® Series 7 namespace to Active Directory as part of the upgrade process. You should treat that as a separate project.

Before you begin

Ensure that you have the skills available, either internal or using external resources. Also consider the hardware that you will need before you begin.

  • Review the Documentation
    Documentation is provided from a variety of sources to help you achieve a successful upgrade.
  • Assess Applications in the Source Environment
    Preparing to upgrade provides an opportunity to review your current Planning investment, and clean up your source environment. Inventory your Planning applications to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in your environment.
  • Perform a Trial Upgrade
    Pilot upgrade projects are valuable and practical exercises because they ensure that the upgrade produce the expected and required outcome. In addition, an evaluation of the pilot project ensures that the upgrade is successful.
  • Create the Test Environment
    Create a test environment for the new software in preparation for your trial upgrades.
  • Plan Your Deployment
    Deployment involves moving applications, models, macros, administration links, or Planning Analyst libraries from one installation to another.
  • Create an Export Deployment Specification
    After planning your deployment, the first step in moving content from the one installation to another is to export the content store or the entries that you want to keep in your new environment. To do this, use the Contributor Administration Console to create a deployment specification in your source environment.
  • Copy the Deployment Specification to the Test Environment
    Transfer the deployment to a test environment, then move the export folder from the source deployment directory location to the deployment directory location for the test environment.
  • Import to the Test Environment
    You can import a model or object to move an application into a test or production environment. Models for import must be in the deployment directory location set in IBM Cognos Configuration.
  • Recommendation - Test the Upgraded Content
    After you import the packages from the deployment archive, you can check that all the entries were deployed successfully in the target environment.
  • Moving to the Production Environment
    When all issues that you discovered during the trial upgrade are resolved, you are ready to begin the full upgrade in your production environment. Your upgrade plan will provide the details for each step of the full upgrade.
Parent topic: Upgrading to IBM Cognos Planning