This weekend, Susquehanna University is upgrading it’s ERP system, Datatel‘s Colleague and Benefactor applications, to Release 18 (Benefactor isn’t being upgraded, but we’re upgrading servers, so it’s being migrated, too). The process began at 1:00 p.m. today and, so far, we haven’t accomplished as much as I would like. Here’s a rundown of things we’ve finished thus far:

  • Ensured all users were out of the system and prevented them from logging in (this took longer than I’d hoped because users were in the system when they knew they shouldn’t have been).
  • Resized and re-indexed all files in both databases. Colleague and Benefactor run on IBM’s UniData database, a file-based, multi-valued RDBMS (though it’s not fully relational because it uses multi-valued fields instead of separate tables for joins).

I’m currently backing up the old/existing system so we can go back to it if we need to. Once that’s done, we will be creating the new software environment, installing 16 months of patches (the DVD Datatel released only has patches through 2005), migrating any new/modified custom work since our last test migration and then fixing some odds and ends.

My goal for the weekend was to be finished in 24 hours (1:00 p.m. Saturday), but with the length of time this backup is taking, that’s not looking too promising.

Stay tuned for updates throughout the weekend.

Update – 5:18 p.m.: The application environment has been populated and it’s on to software updates! During our most recent test run, the software update process took just under five hours to complete, so we’re looking at just about 10:00 p.m. before we move on to the next step (a backup, followed by install custom work and migrating new/modified custom work).

Update – 10:43 p.m.: Software updates have been installed!  Now I’m on to another backup and then installing some custom software.  Then, it’s another backup and migrating custom work.

Update – 4:00 a.m.: It’s 4:00 a.m. and we’re pretty much finished. We still have to do the interface between databases and set up the connection between one database and a web site, but a consultant from Datatel is going to do that for us latter today. It looks like I’ll be able to sleep in today and then go back to work tomorrow after church to finish up some odds and ends.