Working with version management and promotion management best practices BO 4.1

[former_member299688]

Hi Experts

I wondered if anybody knows if there is a document or something about best practices to work with the version management and promotion management in BO 4.1?

Our Environment includes two servers. The first one is our development and test server. The second server is our prod system.

Now on the dev server we have basically two folders called dev and test. We control access to them with a right system based on the folder structure.

My question now is how you would work in this scenario (third server is not an option). Main target is to have as few reports as possible. Therefore we try to work with the version management system and only have one version of each report in the dev folder of the cms. But this is where problems start. Sometimes the newest version is not the version we want to publish to the test folder or even prod server.

How would you publish the report to the other folder? Make a copy of the concerned report (transport to the same system via promotion management is not possible). Also how would you use the version management in regards to the folder structure? Only use version management in dev folder and export reports to test folder (out of vms control) or also use vms in test folder and how would that work?

Further more I’d be interested in learning best practices with promotion management. I found out that the promotion of a report that doesn’t exist in prod doesn’t make any problems. But as soon as an older version already exists there is only partial success and the prod folder gets renamed to “test”.

Any suggestions on how to handle these problems?

Thank you and regards

Lars

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Since you are using the server for both Dev and Test, it is bit complicated when you are using version management.

In your case, you can go to version management, you can retreive the version you want to publish to test folder from 'History'. When you are done, you can always retreive the latest version. But this process little cumbersome.

You can create another folder in Dev, copy the reports you want to publish in to Test folder. But this process is not a best practice of using VM. Version Managment , you want to use the checkin and check out and can retreive the latest versions, if you loose your local copy or report you have some issues.

Please check below link for Promotion Management..

[former_member299688 · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your answer.

So you are basically proposing to work with the vms in the dev folder and publish the desired version to the test folder. And the test folder is out of version control in this scenario if I understood you correctly (like simple data storage)?

And how would you suggest promoting reports to the prod system? Simply by promoting the
desired version from dev folder directly to prod? This would probably lead to inconsistence because we would need to promote from dev system to test and dev to prod instead of promoting a straight line from dev over test to prod. Furthermore it would not solve the problem of the promoting result itself (A new folder called dev will be generated in prod but the report gets promoted to the prod folder if there was no report before).

Thank you for the link. I came across this page just a few days ago and found also lots
of other tutorials and papers describing the basic promoting process. The promoting process in general is clear to me but I wondered if it is possible to change some parameters to  prevent folder renaming for example.

Regards

Lars

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Always Dev should be in Version Management. Developers will be working on it, so they need Version managment. For QA and PROD, we don't need to Version Managment., Since they will have only one copy which is final copy of the report or any object.

Looks like your CUID is changed . Check below KB-

1481841  - 'Status: Partial Success' while promoting an LCM job.

1957033
  - Error "Promotion Status=Failure : Trying to create an object with
duplicate name. ID = XX...

[former_member299688 · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the information.

I verified the CUID in the systems. Waht I did:

- created report and saved in first version to vms

- promotion to prod system

- changed report and saved second version to vms

- promotion to prod system

- changed cms version to version 1 from vms

- promotion to prod system

All of them have the same CUID in prod and dev. But every promotion keeps creating a dev folder in the prod system. The report is beeing created in the prod folder anyway. Do you know how to avoid this useless folder creation?

folders in dev system:

- dev/report-folder/report.wid (original report location and file)

folders in prod system:

- dev/report-folder (Is beeing created every time)

- prod/report-folder/report.wid (Report is beeing saved here)

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Whenver you promote, it should keep the same folder structure as source system.

[Former Member]

We use an independent software Version Manager from ebiexperts that can publish to different folders in one CMS. You need to address different CUID and VM do it selecting the destination universes once before publication. It's working well for us for now 10 years.

Regards

[Former Member]

Hi Lars,

Are DEV reports and TEST reports connected to different source systems?

Thanks,

Wojtek

[former_member299688]

Hi Wojtek

No DEV and TEST is the same system in our case. We only have PRD and DEV and they are connected to BW DEV and BW PRD. DEV System is also connected to BW PRD to test reports with real data.

regards

Lars

[nicothoen]

Best Praktise I've found in the SAP TechEd sessions (read section 5)

This is very usefull especially for a ICT department to Understand and Manage OTAP envirnoments for Business Objects

https://archivesaptechedhandson.hana.ondemand.com/contentArchive/AP263_Exercises_VHO_FINAL.pdf