I am working at client who is considering upgrading to Version 8.0.01. I was wondering if anyone was willing to share any user stories on their upgrade experience, feelings on the stability of it, and any other useful pieces of information that are worth considering before upgrading. Currently we are in a 7.7.03 environment on a linux platform.

Thanks in advance for your time and responses!

I have had my 8001 Dev environment up and running for about 2 months now. I am running on Linux for the Client ant Windows for the Reporting Server. I don’t think there is a true upgrade path from 7.7.03, so I did clean installs on new environments. I also use Weblogic for the front end, so a few words of advice here. I also installed my Report Caster and Distribution Server on the Windows box where my Reporting Server sits.

1. Before you deploy ibi_apps.war, make sure you have your CLASSPATH set with the correct JDBC driver for your database for the repository.
2. Make sure you have your repository created, the install script doesn’t actually do that part unless you are using Derby. Read on in the directions for how to create this.
3. Repository – I found that the migration scripts don’t play well with “\” in the DB name with a different instance. It’s the way Linux interprets the backslash. I ended up with a lot of cross pollination between two database instances with the Report Caster, BI Portals, etc, so I ended up just going with the default database instance. Not necessarily an IBI issue.
4. MRE Migration was pretty straight forward. I didn’t import in my dashboards as I wanted to setup portals instead
5. Security – Good Luck still learning all of that.
6. Most of our reporting dashboards worked fairly well right out of the box. Of course further regression testing is required and I am sure we will find something.
7. The new Portal creator is pretty interesting, but it doesn’t have a feature to get simulated data instead of real data.
8. Report Caster is quite different, getting used to it.
9. Looking at the LDAP integration with the AutoADD feature and integration with SSO.
10. I like the Portal Publish/Unpublish feature, so I can take a portal down if need be.

We are still far out from being production ready as I have some open defects that need to be fixed by IBI, but hopefully in the coming months that will resolve them in future releases. Overall, so far I am liking the product.

Hopefully this helps.

Thanks for your input Matt. If we do upgrade anytime soon, I'll definitely add these things into my projections.