A few weeks ago, we finished a Documentum upgrade at a customer site. Now, after having analyzed and made a status point (we do that after each upgrade project to optimize our procedures and skills) it is time to share our experiences. In this post and in the ones that will follow we will describe which issues we were confronted with, which bugs we discovered, and how we proceed to go forward to have a running environment at the end – and of course, a satisfied and happy customer!

Aim of the project

We had to upgrade four environments; development, test, clone, and prod. We had to upgrade or do new installations for the following components: Content Server from 6.5SP3 to 6.7SP2, D2 3.0 to D2 3.1SP1, DTS 6.5SP3 to ADTS 6.7SP2, DA 6.5SP3 to DA6.7SP2, DFS6.7SP2, xPlore 1.4

Upgrade plan

We first started with the Dev environment to define our processes. Then, we built a clone of the production repositories to validate the upgrade process, to do the test, and to validate the xPlore high availability installation. The xPlore HA has been covered with the installation of two xPlore instances on different physical servers, and the use of a DSearch URL configured in F5 (master-slave and not in load balancing mode) for the search. With all that, not only has the xPlore installation been validated, but the upgrade process could also be run faster as we had to index only a gap of objects on the day we did the production upgrade. But let’s wait for a future blog where this will be described.

Issues/bugs summary

So first of all, I will summarize the issues/bugs we had to deal with. The details will be published in the next blogs.

On the content server side:
– We discovered a bug when we moved to the summer time; for instance a job that had to run at 4:00 AM started indeed at four o’clock but it also started every two minutes until 5 AM.
– D2EventSenderMailMethod does not work anymore since we installed the patch 12 for the Content Server 6.7SP2.

On ADTS:
– Some ADTS processes randomly stopped working using a domain user as the installation owner.

On DA:
– Documents could not be downloaded.

On the D2-Client:
– Facets are configured in xPlore, but date attributes cannot be listed by date.
– We had some difficulties to implement the SSO based on NTLM. As we use D2 3.1SP1 which is in my point of view a 4.x version, we did not know exactly which documentation to use. Even the EMC support had to investigate to find some information.
– The ActiveX for D2 3.1SP1 could not be installed.
– SSO and D2DFS.
– Some icons where missing in D2-Client.

So let’s see what will be posted in the next days/weeks, which I hope will help people in their upgrade projects.

The title of the related blogs will begin with “Documentum upgrade project”.

Enjoy the reading!