We are very familar with the Change Management utility provided in WebFOCUS and we currently use it. One of its drawbacks is that it is mostly a manual process.

We are wondering has anyone in the WF community added some automation to the process of using the CM utility. Is anyone useing a different external tool to accomplish the same thing?

Our team that promotes files from the development to test to prodution environment is asking if there is something that can be done with scripting and prompts to make it a less manual process.

I searched Focal Point and did not find that there were any posts about automating the process to some degree so please reply if you know of any options to investigate. Thanks!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

Hi SandyM,

Have you seen the "Change Management Export" and "Change Management Import" sections at WebFOCUS Managed Reporting? Is this how you're currently running Change Management?

Regards,

Kathryn

SandyM,

Where I worked previously we used Harvest (change management tool) along with some additional scripting to automatically promote and process the zip files. It was quite a while ago but I'll see if I can remember enough to at least summarize the process.

The developer would create his/her zip file and check it in to Harvest. Then a home-grown script, called from within Harvest, would run at a predetermined time (or times) and would;
Copy the zip file(s) to the target machine cm/load directory.
Execute the IBI script that loads zip files.
Check the cmevent.log file for errors.
Report back with the results (I don't remember how this was incorporated into Harvest).

I believe that there was a way in Harvest to see the contents of the zip file although I don't recall how that was accomplished but there were approval processes/procedures set up within Harvest. After an approval from "whomever", the zip file was again automatically promoted up to the next logical environment and automatically processed there.

As I'm writing, I'm realizing there were other aspects to this that are foggy that I just don't remember too much about how the versioning control worked, the setup within Harvest to demote a zip file, we had a script that would purge old zip files, etc.).

I know I haven't given you much but I hope that at least some of this helps.

Craig

Thanks for the feedback. We will probably continue to use the WF Change Management utility. The development team asked me to investigate any other known options so I posted the question since the Focal Point commnity is so vast and very helpful. I appreciate your response.