Business Objects Migration to XI

Steps For Business Object Migartion to latest version (BO XI R2)

1।Identify Suuport Teams: - The support teams should be identified before proceding for migration or upgardation. These Support Team will be required during the Upgrade/Migration.

a. Database Administration Team
b. Operating System Administration Team
c. Hardware Support Team
d. Third Party Software Support Team (Web and Application Servers).
e. Business Objects Support Team

2.Analysis of Current system:– The detailed analysis of existing system should be done stating of migartion or upgardation of existing system. Following are the major area of concentration while doing the study of existing system.
a. Existing Network Architecture
b. Business Objects Deployment Architecture
c. Existing Repository layout
d. Web-Intelligence
e. Universe & reports
f. User Setup
g. Audit Data

3.Analysis for Target system:– The detailed analysis should be done for covering the requirements and providing new or enhanced features of Business Objects XI Release 2. Following are the major area of concentration while doing the study of Target system

a. Network Architecture
b. Business Objects Deployment Architecture
c. New Folder and category structure for Web-Intelligence
d. Rights for Universe & reports
e. New Security model similar to the existing system
f. Setup of Audit Data
g. Integration of New features

4. Backup of existing production environment:- Creation of another production environment of the existing setup for parallel testing and fault tolerance before starting the actaul migration or upgrades. Steps for taking a backup

a. Running a Repair and Compact on your source:- This should be performed on the existing system to rectify the error and to check the integrity of the system.

b.Exporting locally stored objects:- All the objects that needs to be migrated to new system should be present in the repository. So before starting the migration the latest or required objects should be moved from locally to Business Objects repository.

c. Source Repository Backup:- The backup of the source repository should be created. In case if there will be some problem faced while migration. So with the help of this backup system will be resorted.

5.Creation of New Environment:- Next step is to create a new development, QA and production environment of Business Objects XI release 2.

a. Configuration Business Objects Server:- The configuration of target system needs to done based on the requirement and the required hot fixes or patches will be installed on the target system.

b. Backing up the destination CMS database:- The destination CMS database will backup before migration. This will be required in case of phased migration. This step is least required for new target installations.

6. Ensuring appropriate rights before migration:- Following rights are required for migration

a. A General Supervisor in existing Business Objects 5.x environment.
b. An Administrator group user in the target Business Objects XI Release 2 environment.
c. To import any resource into the CMS, The rights needed to add objects to the destination folder to which the resource is assigned.

7. Migration of Objects (Actual Migration)

In this Incremental approach migrations will be performed Application by Application. This is a good approach in my view. In this approach initial, phased import of BI content will be performed. After each import the contents are verified and validated.

The initial migration if performed by importing source user groups and content into the new environment gradually. Validation will be done after each sweep with the Import Wizard. If there are any issues, those are fixed right there and don’t have to begin the entire migration all over again.

Migration’s can also structure in the phases deepening on the structure of existing repository or the logical groupings of user groups and resources. The security setup should be done manually.

Phase can be prepared for example to migration:
§ Department by department
§ Application by application (by resource type)
§ Domain by domain

In this step actual migration will be performed with the help of Migration wizard. Migration will be performed using incremental approach. The migration will be done by object by object. The migration will be performed from Business Objects 5.1.6 to development environment of Business Objects XI release 2

The whole migrations process will be completed in 4 steps. Each step will follow complete software development lifecycle. This will give us following advantages

· Greater control over each migration
· Only the last update to be rolled out if there are errors
· Changes can continue on the source system for the areas that are still to be migrated

For each step testing will be done as:

Verifying the import process:- In this step initial testing of import process will be performed by following ways
1. Checking the log files
2. Verifying the counts and timestamp of objects, user etc.

Testing:- In this part Objects testing should be performed based on manual and random testing.

The steps are defined as follows -

a. User / Group Migration: During this step all the users information will be migrated from Business Objects 5.1.6 to Business Objects XI release 2. In first step following Objects will be migrated

· Repository Domain Migration – The existing repository domain will be migrated in new environment. In Business Objects XI release 2 the domain is migrated as folders.

· User / Groups Migration – All the User and Groups will be migrated from existing system to the New system. New security system will be implemented in new environment similar to existing environment.

b. Universe Migration:- In this step following objects will be migrated. All the universes will be migrated from Business Objects 5.1.6 to Business Objects XI Release 2.

· Connection Migration - Here all the connections related information will be migrated.

· Universes Migration - All the universes will be migrated from source system to new target system.


At the end of second step there will be following deliverables
· Detailed document on Universe Management
· Test case and test result on Universe and connection migration
· New development Environment having Universe and User information ready for migration in QA environment for UAT.

c. Report Migration:- In this step all the reports will be migrated and verified. In this step following objects will be migrated.

· Full Client Reports Migration – In first pass all the full client reports will be migrated and verified with the migrated universes and connections.

· Webi Reports Migrations – after successful migration of full client reports, Webi reports will be migrated to new system.

d. Integration testing :- In this step the integration testing, Minor modification will be performed on objects. Here the entire new development setup of Business Objects XI release 2 will be tested in one go.

At the end of this phase we will get the new system of Business objects XI release 2 having above objects.

8. Planning for Customization: - The required customizations should be identified so that new environment will also be similar to the existing environment. As the security model in Business Objects 5.1.6 is user centric and the security model in XI Release 2 is object centric. There will be need to customize the security setup and user information.