Planning the Upgrade

We recommend that you 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 expected behavior, new features, deprecated features, compatibility between versions, and requirements for preparing your production environment. When you finish the review, you can then conduct a site survey to identify the BI infrastructure, applications, reports, and custom configuration settings. Finally, you can test the upgrade on a subset of your data so that you can fine tune your reports and data before committing to the full upgrade.

Use the following checklist to guide you through the planning process:

	Review the documentation
	Conduct a site survey
	Perform a trial upgrade
	Review the move to the production environment

Review the Documentation

Cognos provides documentation from a variety of sources to help you achieve a successful upgrade. All of the documentation is available online at the Cognos Global Customer Services Web site (http://support.cognos.com).

Steps

1. Read the "What’s New" section in this guide .

   It contains a list of new, changed, deprecated, and removed features for this release.

2. Read the rest of the Upgrade information in this document.

3. Read the topic about Cognos 8 with other Cognos products .

   It contains information about other Cognos products that you may have in your environment and that must be considered in the upgrade.

4. From the Documentation link on the Cognos Global Customer Services Web site (http://support.cognos.com), download and review the latest versions of the following documentation:

   • Cognos 8 Readme

     The Readme is regularly updated to document issues that might affect you during an upgrade.

   • the document Upgrading to Cognos 8 BI 8.3: Changes in Product Behavior (http://support.cognos.com/go/docs/cognos8_bi/8.3/changes_productbehavior.html)

     This document includes examples of the changed behavior and solutions for issues that may occur during the upgrade.

   • Cognos 8 New Features Guide

   • the "What’s New" and upgrade sections of the Framework Manager User Guide

   • the "What’s New" and upgrade sections of the Report Studio Professional Authoring User Guide

   • the "What’s New" and upgrade sections of the Cognos 8 Transformer User Guide

     Read these sections only if you use Transformer.

   • Cognos 8 Migration Tools User Guide

     This document describes how to upgrade metadata, Impromptu catalogs and reports, PowerPlay reports, and Upfront content from Cognos Series 7 to Cognos 8.

   • the release notes and upgrade sections of the Cognos 8 SDK Developer Guide

     Read these sections only if you use SDK applications.

   • all Best Practices documents about upgrading

Conduct a Site Survey

Do a site survey to assess the current production environment and identify areas that require attention during an upgrade. The site survey should include information about the infrastructure, applications, users, and configuration settings for your Cognos 8 products.

Steps

1. Assess the third-party software that you use in your reporting application by doing the following:

   • List third-party software, such as operating systems, Web servers, security, databases, and so on.

   • Compare the list to the supported versions for your target upgrade version, available from the Production Information, Software Environments links at the Cognos Global Customer Services Web site (http://support.cognos.com).

   • Determine whether any third-party components require updating.

2. List your BI applications, including

   • Framework Manager models, packages, and reports

   • Metrics Manager packages, projects, and extracts

   • SDK applications and their dependencies

3. List content that you plan to migrate or upgrade from other Cognos products, such as Transformer models and PowerCubes.

4. List all the reports contained in your application and do the following:

   • Flag heavily used reports and high-profile reports for priority treatment during the upgrade.

     Use audit report data to determine report usage. For more information about audit reports, see the Administration and Security Guide.

   • Flag reports that fail to run or validate in the current environment.

     They are unlikely to upgrade successfully. Repair these reports so that they upgrade.

   • Consider retiring unused or little-used reports.

5. If you will be upgrading Transformer models, list the models that you want to upgrade.

6. List the following information about your configuration:

   • configuration settings that you enabled using Cognos Configuration

     These settings are preserved through the upgrade. They are stored in two files. For ReportNet, the files are crnstartup.xml and crnlocale.xml. For Cognos 8, the files are cogstartup.xml and coglocale.xml.

   • changes to other configuration files

     Changes to other files must be made manually during the upgrade. If you changed other configuration files, you must assess the changes that you want to preserve in the upgraded environment. This may include .xml, .txt, and .css files in the configuration, templates, webapps, and webcontent directories of the installation location.

     Important: Changes to .ini files are not supported. If you changed .ini files, please contact Customer Support.

7. Back up all reports, models, and configuration data and files

8. Create an upgrade plan.

Perform a Trial Upgrade

We recommend that you perform a trial upgrade several weeks before upgrading your production system. The trial upgrade identifies components that will upgrade with minimal effort and components that may require additional actions before or after the upgrade.

Steps

1. Prepare the test environment:

   • Install the new release system in the test environment.

   • Configure the test system to match your production environment.

   • Manually configure customization.

2. Deploy your current reporting application on the test system:

   • Upgrade report specifications from the source to the test system.

   • Validate report specifications on the test system.

3. Test your reports:

   • In Report Studio, validate each report and note whether the validation was successful.

   • In Report Studio, Query Studio, and Analysis Studio, run the applicable reports and note whether each report ran successfully.

4. Test models and PowerCubes in Cognos 8 Transformer, if required:

   • Open models with the appropriate security options and save them.

   • Test PowerCubes.

5. Repair or exclude reports and models that do not operate correctly.

6. Test the repaired reports and models by running them again on the test system.

   Troubleshoot any issues, and contact Cognos Support about unresolved upgrade issues.

7. Revise the upgrade plan to include adaptations that you made during the trial upgrade.

Review the Move 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.

The steps below are a summary of the process. For detailed steps, see Upgrading from ReportNet, Metrics Manager, or Earlier Versions of Cognos 8.

Steps

1. Prepare the production environment:

   • Back up files and data.

   • Install your new release system in the production environment.

   • Configure the system.

   • Manually configure customization.

2. Deploy the application on the production system.

3. Deploy the reports and models from the test system to the production system.