To upgrade or not to upgrade that is the question (8.4 to 10)?

[owensct]

Hi all,

New to the group.

I wanted to base with everyone to get some input on the question of upgrading to Cognos 10.

We have ReportNet 1.1 that is currently in production and as part of the process to upgrading to 8.4 I moved RN 1.1 to a Virtual Server and started my upgrade of 8.4 on the ReportNet server.

When I initially started the upgrade I followed the IBM supplied docs on upgrading ReportNet 1.1 to Cognos 8.4. While in that process I encountered an issue and called support and IBM told me Oh No!!! You don't want to run the upgrade process from ReportNet to 8.4 and had me uninstall all the 8.4 modules, then uninstall ReportNet, delete the ReportNet content store etc, etc, (you get the idea) and basically start from scratch.  :'( MS-SQL was still on the system, IIS was setup and configured, as well as my existing ODBC configuration to my backend AS/400.

So I did a fresh install and I'm still working to get everything setup and configured, (I'm the only person on this project right now and could use about 10).   :( At this point I have 8.4 installed and working, (not all the modules are installed), a number of models for our various systems setup and configured and look to be working. The system has not been released to any users and I have not converted any of the old ReportNet reports yet.

I am assuming that since we don't have the Cognos 8.4 in production yet and none of my old reports converted that the upgrade would be fairly simple and straight forward?

And that I can actually use the "upgrade" process to go from 8.4 to 10.1 without getting another Oh No!!! from IBM.

I really don't want to complete the 8.4 and then in 6-8 months start the process of upgrading to 10.  :o

What do you think??

Cheers,

Gordon

[cognostechie]

I don't know how you started upgrading from RN to 8.4 but if you did a clean install of 8.4 and used a seperate Content Store for 8.4, then I don't see why you should have a problem.

I upgraded 1.1 to 8.4 for a client single-handedly and didn;t have a problem in upgrade. The only problem I had was in some reports due to Javascripting and Master-Detail relationships. Those had to be fixed but most of it went thru fine.

8.4 to 10.1 is realtively a much starightforward upgrade (theoritically) but the practical experience is another story. You might want to read other posts on this forum regarding 10.1 that might give you an idea.

[bdbits]

There are a couple of methods to go from 8.4 to 10, and since they are in the guides I would hope they will support you if you use one of them.

We just brought up our first v10 server. Our server admin exported the content store from 8.4.1 and imported it to Cognos 10. It seems to have worked well for us, but testing thus far has been very limited. We have been discussing it and may use this method to migrate, as we could then also update to a newer server configuration. Based on what I have seen thus far, it is a nice upgrade and you should definitely deploy v10 to your users now rather than later.

[owensct]

Guys,

Thanks for the replies. Based on what you said I am thinking that upgrading to 10 before we go any further is most likely the best approach. I need to do some additional research, but your thoughts on the matter are most helpful.

Cheers,

Gordon

[mtroyano]

I have migrated "Cognos 8.4.0" to "Cognos 10.1" creating a full deployment. Then I imported a database empty and everything was perfect. That if, remember to install the Fix Pack 1 because it will fail a lot.