E9 to E10 – Day 2: Prerequisites Complete

Yesterday I’d gotten as far as clicking the Update Now button to start Windows Update on my servers. Strangely enough, when I’ve come in this morning there is another update to do…the one that upgrades them to SP1. So those 96 from yesterday were just the precursor to applying SP1 and they’d taken 2 hours and 20 minutes to download and install!

Prerequisites (Continued)…

Before I go any further I’m having the IT guys snapshot the servers so I can roll back if things go pear-shaped. This is the second snapshot we’ve taken. As the Epicor 9 install here was at 9.05.700c and part of the path to E10 is the need to first be on 9.05.702a we took a pre-patch copy of the servers, not just to make sure we can roll back if we make a mistake but also to allow us to roll back to test the upgrade process again when we’ve been through everything we need do to get it to 10. Getting to 702 was pretty straight-forward, anyone who’s done a patch install will do this with their eyes closed. Spread over 2 1/2 days it took a total of 8 hours to download the update, install it, run the necessary conversion programs, and refresh the training database. Why spread out? Unfortunately we still have ongoing developments to do in the E9 system that’s Live at the moment so wait periods during the patch/upgrade is development time. I would have liked to have the luxury of a code freeze but it’s not practical here so we’ll redevelop the additional E9 pieces that we complete when E10 is ready for testing by the business.

Anyway, carrying on with the prerequisites I’ve checked that the Full-Text Search feature is installed on the SQL Server instance. In SQL Server Management Studio I entered the following:

SELECT

FULLTESTSERVICEPROPERTY(‘IsFulltextInstalled’)

IF (1 =

FULLTESTSERVICEPROPERTY(‘IsFullTestInstalled’)) print ‘Installed’ else print @NOT INSTALLED’

My query returned “1” so yes, its already installed. “0” would have meant it wasn’t.

We’ve never had SQL Server Reporting Services running in our Live environment but as luck would have it we had installed the components in the Development one just a couple of weeks ago. So the next step for us is to verify the settings. A quick check in the SQL Server Reporting Services Configuration Manager tells me it’s all up and running.

There seems to be a lot of housekeeping to do before we can get any closer to installing E10. I’m sure they are all necessary. I guess running through them all gives you a chance to see what condition your install was in while also giving you the peace of mind that you haven’t got problems later due to something you skipped earlier.

I cleared out all of the MIA* and *.TMP files from my Temp directory. These could have contained folders and files from a previous failed upgrade attempt and I’ve deleted them to make sure the install is clean.

Next, on to cleaning up Epicor 9. All financial groups must be posted which isn’t all that time-consuming but remember that when you go live you’ll need to make sure that there are either no groups to be posted or check with finance to make sure that posting them is acceptable. The Capture COS/WIP Activity Process should be run too. We’re not using the production modules here yet so I didn’t expect the latter to take too long to complete although it still took 1 hour 16 minutes!

My SQL collation settings are correct, SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and the compatibility level is SQL 2008 (100) for my databases.

We aren’t using the Payroll module so while there was no real need to run the export process I did anyway and the file produced was blank.

There are a couple of financial conversions to run but as we’ve already upgraded from 9.05.700c to 9.05.702A the conversions are either not applicable or have already been run.

Seems to have gone pretty smooth so far. I’m hoping I haven’t spoken too soon though…

After backing up the database and the Epicor directories and making sure the Server Roles were configured correctly we move onto the installation of Epicor ERP 10.