Years of developer activity retired…. Just like that
How would a developer who does not have access to KB find anything informative?
Is that intentional?
Why wouldn’t OT give out a fair warning to migrate content for content owners?
Much of code I kept for public consumption was here
So if anybody is looking for that write me I will try to find from local copies
Start with my first article in this series
BTW this is kind of a cookery show kind where they put the main course in the oven and take another finished one .I did not accomplish any of this in one day it took a lot of homework and trial runs.I read the case studies by the great Rob Coutts many times over.
For sanity we decided to use a new box for CS10.5
Recently I was tasked with upgrading our systems from its initial version to two times jump so 971 to 10.5.I will chronicle my experiences here. Perhaps provide a structure.I also want to quell some myths about the whole process just to make sure you can do this logically and correctly.
First create a draft plan,in my draft plan I included this.I would need at least one VM that can house or Production 971 Binaries,a clone of the database and a clone of the EFS.If one had been storing items in perhaps Archive Server one should have a playing copy of that also. An OTAS based livelink upgrade can pose its challenges if not done correctly but it is no different than a EFS if you do it wrong you can write test data into your productive store 🙂 This involves talking to other people like DBA’s and Storage folks as a heavily used LL system can have tons and tons of data.You will most likely encounter the after effects of long time use,different administrators and their styles etc.So after a few failed attempts I understood why OT says a DB5 verification is very important.The Verification basically runs single threaded and will try to pinpoint anomalies in the database.Most likely it will pinpoint content loss such as bulk imports etc without actual version files et al .In my case the database had wrong pointers,duplicate dataid’s (wow),removed KUAf Id’s(somebody had fun with a oracle tool).So after going back and forth between OT and us I just thought like this and created a program(oscript) to check important structures.I list 3,your mileage will vary but essentially I grabbed all categories ,form templates and wf map structures.None of these checks happen in DB5 it just looks for existence.In hilarious cases I uncovered a category data structure mysteriously would turn up as a drawing PDF.One could argue that the users would have noticed, so this was an old category that nobody noticed.You don’t have to do this but each of those anomalies would prevent a upgrade and it is back and forth with OT support so I did it just to get some time advantage.
The second thing was I had to get all the optional modules and our system is no different from any other system a lot of optional modules some inserting schema some not.
The third thing was our systems were customized with Oscript to provide enhanced user experience as well as awesome home written modules that takes the tedium of long running things like category upgrades,permission pushes et al a very intelligent add on to the OI module that people can use generically to upload their data like that.So our team sat down and thought of what we could retire and what we should re-code,refactor so many of them were thrown out .Many useful ones we kept.We particularly liked the Distributed Agent framework,ours is very similar to that but if time comes and there is an appetite we would code it for that.
About the re-coding effort here’s the clunker,we were to use CSIDE .Naturally all of my team are hard core Builder aficionados and boy that was a journey.I probably think we were the first org to do something with CSIDE so naturally I gave them a lot of screenshots and dumps and OT dev was very receptive.In extremely tight time constraints we developed parallel modules in 97 1 and 10 and just just sucked them up for our SRC code maintaining thing called TFS. We also learned how to work parallel on oscript but not being a code churning house our code is not that complicated so if I was working on a module somebody else was working on another as well.
So the environment prepared was
At this point one can take this to a CS10.5 binary and start the upgrade.That is my next article.
BTW- I am not a novice when it comes to Upgrades I started using livelink software in 1999 and has worked in version 8.1.5 so I pretty much know the heartbeat of an upgrade and gets pleasure in challenges and how one methodically removes the challenges.Do not try an upgrade if you have not dry run the procedure without fail a couple of times.In most cases the upgrade can be done timely the planning can take weeks,if not months.
Permissions
At the outset a Livelink system represents some vestiges of a File System like Unix or Dos.People having worked in that is probably familiar with the term U G O which stood for User,Group,Others.This is what you see in the std permission bit of an object on its ACL. Every object has one ,many times you set the container object right and let the inheritance trickle in.In many places if you set it right you can forget it.But if you install livelink Out of the Box and has no training or nobody to watch it over you are probably going to end up in rogue territory.This is because the user ‘Admin’ and ‘Default Group’ has very high permission bits set.Out of which the owner is a role,so if you start a folder where Admin did not willfully do the permissions set normalization and if you gave ‘Appu’ creation privileges for folder when ‘Appu’ creates objects he becomes owner who is very powerful and so on.Now this could be argued as not a big problem until it runs amok.So what a good permission model is Owner See,See Contents or Nothing,Group See,SC or Nothing and PA,S,SC or nothing.Now you will create administrative groups something simlilar to these discussions and you will be fine.
Always rely on proper groups that you can create and maintain in a directory service (AD is very common) and have those groups synchronized in.It is quite possible that HR systems release feeds into Directory services hence when users leave your organization they will go as well.There will be no permission problems because the real administrative group has overriding permissions that the owner based approach.Simple try it and you will be happy and 50 % of your help desk tickets will come down.
This is what one hears in OpenText engagements as “Community Modelling” well my next part will cover object truth tables as well.
Permissions bit use BitWise logic in FileSystems as well as livelink does recently a programmer told me he finds the awesome bitwise logic un understandable.I just thought wow where is the programming world heading into 🙂
There is nothing wrong in owner having high permissions so long as the administration is willing to support it and understand it.
Security Clearance and Supplemental Markings are OT’s way of securing against inheritance rules in big hush hush organizations.
Update:10/22/2014
Me and my colleagues recently used this framework for transporting a custom subtype that we designed.We were helped by a kind OT developer All in all it saved our administration team from running XMLEXPORTS and XMLIMPORTS but the key factor is that needs to work for the transport code to work.
Update ends…
Recently OT announced a “Transport” mechanism. Users working in SAP etc are familiar with such a mechanism as changes to a baseline system are marked as configuration changes and ported to other systems.While I am oversimplifying this in a SAP deployment since so many code modules have to be configured it is impossible for an admin to remember what all has to be changed hence they decided at least 20 yrs back an enterprise program needs a transporting strategy as well.
Now lets look at how livelink gets deployed in an org. Mostly Livelink is deployed to address a document management pain/problem.Some consultants or a admin/developer who gets trained in livelink or somebody who has some documentation starts to install/configure this.assuming the person(s) have some common sense and tickets later it is working.Actually the first time install guide is very nicely written and it is mostly a “next” “next” kind of install.
Having configured it the person/persons start modelling the solution.It may involve setting up folders,categories for collecting metadata,classifications for alternative taxonomies,RM classifications ,Permissions(ACL) etc. OT and a lot of ecosystem partners take the money to sometimes set it up.You can make it complicated or simple.
Ok now that it is past the POC phase the next phase is the perhaps a TEST a more formalized place.Now comes the first shock how do I not necessarily duplicate all the work I did on a lower system.Fortunately while there was no advanced GUI or “Transport Bench” mechanism many of these building blocks can easily be transferred by XML IN/OUT operations.Smarter modules such as Classifications/RM anticipated the need for this so they did make their own transport mechanism well ahead of OT. But almost everything one could accomplish in a poor man’s methods
Now in controlled industries like Pharma etc this manual stuff was sheer heresy so companies like Global Cents made excellent products
So why the Transport now. My theory is the entry of integrations between SAP and Livelink.In fact the web services also was something my thought SAP forced OT’s hands.Many SAP customers are now getting a facelift with livelink doing a lot of backend services,pretty gui’s etc.
Here’s an interesting fictitious exchange between different players in a Integration meeting this is circa 2010,2011
SAP Basis Admin-Here we got the xECM thingy and archive server thingy going with OpenText (Notice OT in that because there is no product called that),I sthere anything else you guys need and can I close the client.
OT Consultant- Oh sure but on the next client you have to give me high access to edit the connections,change a few GUID’s(dataids) etc.
SAP Basis Admin-What the …..That means you have to do all this again
OT Consultant-Not everything just a few tweaks and pointing to the livelink admin..Hey Kishore where are we on the next OT system. Have the ELIB items(categories and folder looking things) coming along
Livelink Admin-I did that according to documentation.
OT Consultant- How about the dataids did you run the queries I gave you for the re-mapping
Livelink Admin-Yeah everything is there
SAP Basis Admin-All the while thinking that what are these guys talking about re-configure every system.I have about 20 different clients I have to maintain.
OT Consultant-Just to prop up the SAP guy,well you know our guys in Germany are coming up with a Transport mechanism just like yours…
Well finally after a lot of back and forths the project is a success
If it is just a DMS project a lot of us have no problem using the old methods.
I am pretty sure the transport mechanism is a GUI version of XML Export/XMl Import.
The reason why I wrote this is recently a friend asked if he would be lucky in a project that would not have Object Importer(OI)/Object Exporter(OE) and its RM variations.
I told him this
OI/OE can be leased from OT for a price .They used to entertain that.
With XMLEXPORT/XMLIMPORT here are a few things you would run into.
. So if one exported PhysObjects the corresponding import will fail.
Now that GUIDS are part of 10 and 10.5 I do not know how that affects anything
OI/OE is kind of a framework .So with that I was able to transport compound email,email folder and email in a project with relatively less coding.
Readers-Please tell me if the Tranport Bench from OT is good and easy to use and it resolves conflicts et al and I will delete my post.
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