Upgrade from Cognos 8.1 to 8.3

[techieaman]

Hello Everyone,

Has anyone done an upgrade from Cognos 8.1 to 8.3? I am looking for the series of steps and things to take care of while doing this upgrade.

Can anyone help me around or provide some documentation for that?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Aman

[rockytopmark]

Never gone from 8.1 to 8.3 directly, but have from 8.2.

No real gotchas that I am aware of.  Just backup your entire 8.1 content store before you start.  We used the existing Content Store and it upgraded flawlessly.

You can always use a new Content Store, and simply use the built-in Content Administration to import the entire 8.1 content store into your new 8.3 environment

[Darek]

There might be a few reports that will fail to migrate. These will have to be recreated from scratch. If you have many reports that need to be checked or validated, use Cognos JAVA code (one of the KB articles talks about it) or purchase the application that is being occasionally advertised on top of these pages.

[bonniehsueh]

Javascript features do not migrate well when upgrading from 8.2 since 8.3 recognizes objects differently. Not sure about from 8.1 but would imagine there would be the same issue. Most of the reports that used Javascript functions did not function properly, like the prompts would look different. Since Cognos doesn't support Javascript customizations there wasn't very much information available on the Cognos Knowledge Base when I had went through an upgrade, but did see a KB article that vaguely discusses a workaround. Most of the time, i had seen people remove the Javascript from their reports. Something to keep in mind during report development...

[hxp417]

Never done a 8.1 to 8.3.
Did 8.1.2 - 8.2, and recently did 8.2 - 8.3.
Both fairly smoothly.

Remember 2 things:

1. simply use the old content store, point your new server to the old content store, don't need to use import/export. software will upgrade your content store for you. (success rate > 95%). We had 100% report/query/job/etc converted successfully from 8.1.2 to 8.2.

And from 8.2 - 8.3, only few reports failed out of few hundred reports (and those errors are all very negligible small little things. )

2. After uninstall, don't delete the folder structure, leave it alone, install the new server to the old location, so you leave the Configuration Info. there for the new version to pick up and take in.

(after 8.2-8.3 upgrade, 2 new user roles were added, "express author" now contains "everyone", and this group will have express Report Studio capability. if you don't want 'everyone' to have this capability, you need to change it.)

There may be other things to change, too.

[raro]

QueryStudio toolbar modifications don't upgrade. Toolbar.xml does not seem to be the place to doit anymore; a solution is not yet known.

[techieaman]

Thanks to everyone for there invaluable inputs. It has been great help.

Warm Regards,

Aman

[josepherwin]

We did straight from 8.1 - 8.3

It works just fine, just make sure you make a backup of the content store as everyone else has stated.

Although we did encounter some bug in one of our most complex report, for some reason, it's complaining about 2 part reference query function has been deprecated. I've logged a case with cognos and it has been marked as a bug, and they are currently trying to fix it.

Dont hold your breath on when they gonna release the fix though.

[techieaman]

Hi,

On one of reports after the upgrade I see a HTTP 500 error. This report has output versions saved on it in HTML format. When I click to open it, a SSL pop-up comes up(Secure/Non-secure). Thereafter, when I say yes, i see the HTTP-500 error.

The PDF ouput of the same report when seen in 8.3 shows up. Can anyone suggest what could be the source of problem here?

Thanks and Regards,

Aman

[josepherwin]

Any HTTP error would indicate that there's something wrong with your Webserver.

Assuming you are using Windows IIS for gateway, check if you've allowed the cognosisapi.dll and cognos.cgi for Web Service Extension properties.

Make sure that it's pointed to the latest (cognos 83) files

[techieaman]

Hi joseph,

We have a sunone web server. do I need to check the same things you suggested for IIS?

Thanks and Regards,

Aman

[josepherwin]

Yes you do.

I believe you got that error because the web server is still pointing to the 8.1 version of the cgi-bin files/folders.