I was wondering if anyone would like to share their reasons for upgrading WebFOCUS? Is there a particular new feature that prompted the decision to upgrade?

Are there any new features in ReportCaster? DataMigrator?

Thanks very much.

Francis,

We're about to upgrade from 5.2.8 to 7.6.1.

Our main consideration for upgrading is simply to keep up-to-date with the release, because 5.2 is being stabilized I believe is the term they use, ie no fixes for problems that arise.

Regards,
Sean

Francis,

Probably the most compelling reason (eventually) is to stay on an officially supported version.

Besides that, new features and bug fixes tie for the top spot.

You are currently on 5.3.3 and I am on 7.1.3. I believe one feature I am using that you do not have is SVG graphics for PDF docuements. I also think CO-ORDINATED PDF documents is a new feature added somewhere between your version and mine.

It has been a while since I upgraded to 7.1.3 so I cannot remember all the new features in 7.1.3 versus 5.3.3.

Ditto Sean's reason/versions. The other major factor is that we're planning on using WF through Citrix and we're been told that they will be only be certifying 7.6.2 (not 7.1.x).

There's certainly some nice features too - Coordinated PDFs, ReportCaster "run every x minutes within x minutes" type stuff, some additional functions also.

Francis,

If I remember correctly, most of our reasons were MRE related. We went from 5.3.3 to 7.1.3 (Support for External Repository in DB2). The next move to 7.6.2? will be for the same reasons...enhancements to MRE.

Kevin

quote:

External Repository in DB2

- that's news to me. I'll have to read up on the new features of MRE.

Francis,

We have both Caster and MRE repositories(tables) in the same database on DB2. We also have a "shared" basedir used by 3 application servers (WF Clients) for MRE. The system has been in Production this way since last July and is functioning extremely well. The configuration was "blessed" by IBI, and is fully supported.

Hope this helps,

Kevin

We've had a couple of specific issues that were fixed in later releases. Most of the time, those have been pretty minor annoyances, but we have run into a few that were major issues for us.

Overall, I'm compelled to just stay as current as possible for supportability and enjoy the new features. We have a small enough environment right now, that an upgrade is fairly painless for us to do. I don't usually pick every dot release, but I try to stay within 2 or 3 dots of the most recent while waiting for the first dot after a major build (7.6.1 for example instead of 7.6).

For our institution, upgrading has been ostensibly for a combination of bug fixes and new features. We started out on 5.3.2 and the MySQL adapter was still being vetted, so we upgraded to 5.3.3 to fix that. Then 7.x came out and the JDBC adapter was much more robust for PostgreSQL, and Tomcat was integrated into Dev Studio, so we upgraded to that, as our install base was still light. Then we flushed out additional adapter bugs and got an interim release 7.1.2, then upgraded to 7.1.3 which was a lot more painful than a minor version should have been....finally settled in with 7.1.4+ just to keep current.

7.6.0 had better adapter support for PostgreSQL, but it broke BID ("My reports", power reporter option), so that upgrade was out. The features of 7.6.1 are really attractive in BID, you can embed the domain tree inside a content block, it has better java applet support on MRE for MacOS, but unfortunately the Firefox support is broken under 7.6.1

That has been our problem, two steps forward (on features/bug fixes), one step back (on new bugs) every step of the weay.

To answer the specific question about compelling features (for us), the MRE/BID enhancements are better in subsequent releases. HTML layout manager is closer to standards based than Resource layout manager, uses the CSS nomenclature. The Reportcaster has been opened up via API and supports SFTP out of the box on 7.6.x. Business views in 7.6 give us a much better ability to maintain custom MFDs while still keeping the original definition, and the synonym interface is now standardized in Dev Studio to be the same as with Data Migrator. The Data Migrator has DBMS flow load so we can put raw SQL in an ETL load on the designer. Data Migrator now supports CVS (and thus Subversion with a similar plugin), so it works with our source code repository.

But we plan to stop chasing after the upgrades on 7.6.2. Soon as the show-stopper bugs are fixed (Firefox). Promise.

Regards,

Dan Kenny
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Prod: WF 7.1.6 Linux BID/MRE/Data Migrator Test: WF 7.6.1 Linux BID/MRE/Data Migrator