I recently
had to upgrade a not too big but quite complex system. The original environment
includes Maximo and ICD, and two large customization packages, one extended the other (let’s call them package XXX extended by package YYY). The target system is the latest Maximo + ICD 7.6.1, plus 4
add-ons which include Oil & Gas and Utilities.
Customization
were written by 3 different third parties over a long period of time and the
source code was lost. This posed some challenges related to preserving customization
and I had to spend a bit of time to figure it out. Below are some of the gotchas I
learnt after the project:
Problem
1: Ensure customization
are preserved after upgrade
After reviewing
the SMP folder, I found about 300 extended java class files, but the product.xml
files only cover about 20-30% of them; worse, some data are not
even up-to-date. After the initial attempt to correct these files, I decided to
simply ignore them, and build new product.xml files from scratch. Below are
some of the key steps I had to do:
